by John Crowley
Dar Oakley settled beside her there. Darkwise the sun was red behind breaking clouds. Billwise, a gray shower of rain went off toward the sea: the night would be clear.
“This night,” she said. “We’ll go.”
“How?” he said, looking around at the bareness. “Where?”
“Down,” she said. “By way of a story.” She laid her staff down beside her, and drew her mantle around her. The clearing wind over the barrow was sharp, even in the hollow where they sheltered. “It will take all night to tell it,” she said. “You have to listen to it all, every word, all the way to the end. Otherwise it will do us no good at all.”
Dar Oakley said nothing. Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.
“If you listen all the way through, and don’t interrupt with silly questions or fall asleep, it’ll do.”
She waited, watching him.
“No questions,” Dar Oakley said. “All right.”
She waited.
“No sleeping,” he said, doubtful but brave—at least he hoped she thought so.
She turned toward the daywise sky, already dark, yet with a bar of glow above the farther hills. Dar Oakley realized in a sudden panic that he had just agreed to spend the night on the ground, a thing he hadn’t done since he was a lost nestling hiding under a bush.
She began to speak. Sometimes her voice rose as though she called softly to someone not present but nearby: that was singing. Sometimes she laughed and struck her knee, and because she laughed, Dar Oakley laughed too. Only after she had been telling the story for a long time did he realize that all the things told of in it had happened long ago, so long he couldn’t compute it in seasons, or in Crow lives. There was a king, she would say. There was a fool. There was a castle. What is a castle? What is a fool? He couldn’t ask. The moon—it was the glow they saw daywise—began to rise, cold-hot and orange. The story went on: fathers and lost daughters, sons who without knowing it mated with sisters or with beings that weren’t People, unwise promises made and kept or broken, swords and cups and crowns and things he couldn’t picture. He felt his eye-haws draw over, and his eyelids fall. He flitted to wake himself. And then, Fox Cap would say. And then. All that time the moon went on rising, first full moon of the winter. It seemed to grow closer as it rose, as though to hear the tale too.
Dar Oakley began to feel that the depression of earth ringed with stones where they sat had grown deeper. But he couldn’t trust his eyes in this light. Fox Cap before him was all gray and featureless except for the glitter of water in her eye if she looked toward the moon. She kept storytelling: Dar Oakley heard about People who lived a hundred lives or who never died, People who had only one eye and one leg apiece but who bested others in battle, singers and songs that caused warriors to lay down their weapons and weep like infants in shame. A woman who was three women, one of them being a Crow as large as a mountain. And always a precious thing lost and found and lost again.
They were definitely sinking, he and Fox Cap.
The moon was high now and cold and pale, and Dar Oakley didn’t know if he was sleeping or awake. The white stones that ringed the edge of the deepening pit were bright in the colorless moonlight. And as Fox Cap went on speaking, weary and nodding and yet never quite falling silent, Dar Oakley knew himself to be standing on, yes, a great body, the body of a person. The hollow where he and Fox Cap were was its wide-open mouth. Those white stone teeth were about to close on them, and they would go down its gullet into the unimaginable innards.
Why didn’t he up and fly away then, while he still could?
He told me it was because he couldn’t see to fly in the darkness of that white light. But I said, It was because you had to know how the story ended.
It was a great Beech-wood they walked in, the tall, thick gray trees all alike and no other trees intruding there. On the ground no mast, only their yellow leaves, falling singly, each one making a faint click as it joined the others on the ground. There was no other sound, no other beasts, no beings but Fox Cap and Dar Oakley, and when Fox Cap spoke, the trees seemed to wake, startled to hear her.
“If you could read, you could read a story made on the bark of these,” she said. “That’s what the green boy told me. He can read, but not me.”
Dar Oakley thought he had had plenty of story and didn’t know how one could be got out of a tree. What he wondered was why these trees shed no nuts.
“Because they never die,” Fox Cap said, “and they want no more of themselves.”
The Beeches seemed to assent to that. Dar Oakley and Fox Cap went on, and though they couldn’t see any path, it seemed the Beeches were gesturing a way for them to go—and now, far off, was the glow of what was surely a People fire, crimson in the gray.
“A fire,” Fox Cap said, and went ahead faster. Fires made places amid placelessness for People, Dar Oakley thought, a way of having a dwelling-place wherever they went. When he and Fox Cap came closer, they could see that someone sat by the fire as though to warm himself, though it was neither cold nor hot in this place. The one who sat by it never looked up as Fox Cap and the Crow on her shoulder approached him, though he seemed to know by the rustle of the dry leaves that someone was near. Fox Cap came before him, and studied his old immobile face, his eyes white as though a haw like a Crow’s had been drawn over them. Fox Cap knelt before him and put her hands on his old ones, which lay like dry husks on his knees.
Father, she said to him.
Dar Oakley knew what she’d said, though he heard no sound. In her face was something that one day he would call Pity, though he didn’t recognize it then in People, nor in himself.
Father, she said again. I’ve come from other lands. I ask for passage out of this wood. I have a long way to go.
The blind man considered this, or didn’t—he made no sign. But after a time he put out his narrow claw, palm up, asking for something (that was clear enough) to be put in it. Fox Cap searched within her clothes, finding nothing but a tiny metal cup, a thing Dar Oakley had never seen. She put it on the old beggar’s outstretched hand. He felt it there, and with the fingers of his other hand he gently examined it; he smiled, as though he’d found it to be what he’d expected to get, and tucked it away.
Father, Fox Cap said softly. May I pass here? Tell me.
Effortfully the old man’s mouth opened, as though it hadn’t done so in a long time.
Daughter, he said.
Like a breath out of a cave, or the hiss of a wavelet withdrawing down pebbled shingle. Dar Oakley barely heard it. Fox Cap’s eyes hadn’t left the old man’s gray face, but now they shone or glittered in a way Dar Oakley’d seen before and not understood.
Daughter, the man said again. Why have you come here? What are you in search of?
A thing, Fox Cap said, by which I may not ever die. Nor my kind.
No need, the beggar said. You have a Crow.
Dar Oakley, startled to hear himself spoken of, nearly lost his place on Fox Cap’s shoulder.
You have a Crow, the old one said. Crow never dies.
Not so, Dar Oakley said. Why, I . . .
But the old man had raised his hand as though to call silence, or perhaps to speak to many listeners, it was hard to tell.
It’s not a thing you ought to seek, he said. But as I love you, I will give you passage. It’s for you alone.
He put his hand inside his rags, and brought out the same little cup or cap that Fox Cap had given to him.
There, he said, and he put it in her hand as she had put it in his. That’ll do.
She studied the little thing as though she’d never seen it before. Then she nodded to the blind man with slow reverence, and though he surely couldn’t see her, he nodded to her, too. Then he lifted a skinny finger and touched her darkwise eye.
She stood, turned away from the fire, shook her head, smiling, and set out the same way she’d been going, Dar Oakley hopping after her
. Their way out of the Beech-wood was clear now. For you alone the man at the fire had said, but Dar Oakley was here too, and he wasn’t going back. He didn’t mind walking along beside her; Crows after all walk for hours every day, searching for things to eat. Out of habit he looked around for such here, though there was none.
“Was that your father?” he asked Fox Cap.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“What is that thing you gave him, that he gave you?”
“A thing,” she said. She showed him: she’d put it on the tip of her longest finger, where it fit perfectly, made to go there. “It’s good that I had it, I guess.” He could see that her darkwise eye, the one the old one’s finger had touched, was no longer green as the other was but blue, the blue of lake water under dawn sun.
She held out her hand to him to mount, and turned to the way ahead, which even as she looked grew suddenly wider; it now led downward into a broad land, green and yellow, a foaming river rushing through it. Great stony mountains rose up on either side, clad in black firs; a sun setting or rising; a wind. Far off, a tower.
“The Happy Valley,” Fox Cap said, and laughed.
“Where are all the ones we saw before?” Dar Oakley asked, suddenly remembering that mob of silent beings, their pale faces looking back at him as they hustled Fox Cap away. “And where are all the ones you found and dug out of the earth and then put in again in their new places?”
“They’re in the North.”
“This is the North. You said.”
But Fox Cap told him how within the Great North there was also a north and a south to go endlessly in, and within that north also a north and a south, and the dead lay in all of them waiting. How could those places be within and yet not be smaller? To Dar Oakley within could only mean little: within an egg, within a grove, within a nut.
“It’s upside down here,” Fox Cap said. “Day’s night. Dark’s light. Left’s right. There are five directions: North, South, East, West, and Here. Here is the one that measures all the rest. It’s where you are and where you may be next. That’s the way we go.”
Dar Oakley had lost his billwise sense, and so he just went with her where she said to go. Wherever she went she seemed to be recognized or remembered, though not the Crow beside her—it was as though no one could quite perceive him there. In huts and byres she was comforted and given food and drink, but couldn’t be understood; in forts and castles she was challenged to games and fights, and promised that if she won, she’d be told what she wanted to know.
In a tower on a hill, a king offered her a bet. He said that if she let him chop off her head, she could chop off his in turn, and he would marry her and give her all that she wanted. Just in time she remembered how this trick went, and when the king’s head was off and hers was still on her shoulders—Dar Oakley can’t recall the way she did it—she held the head up by its long hair.
Now tell me, she said to it. Tell me where the Most Precious Thing can be found. In what land or place, in whose keeping.
No, the king’s head said.
You must. You promised.
Won’t, the king’s head said.
So she made a cup of the king’s skull and drank from it to hear his secret thought, and carried it as she went. The fluid that filled it tasted of iron.
“I know these folk,” she said, walking with a long stride, and confident. “I know the tales.”
“But what if he or anyone tells you the wrong place, and sends you off to where it isn’t?”
“They can’t. They have to tell the truth. In this land there are no lies.”
That might be so, but it didn’t mean they couldn’t speak in riddles or tell the truth in opposites or say one thing and mean another: for though she followed the instructions of the severed head, and the patterns of the game boards, and the songs in tree-language that the singers sang, she came no closer to the Most Precious Thing.
They went North. Dar Oakley walked beside her or rode her shoulder, and in his weariness and boredom he wondered if he had come nowhere at all, if he wasn’t still on the body-shaped hill listening to the tale she told there: as though that tale had been about her all along, about what was to come and not what had once been.
Because of where she had come from—so she told Dar Oakley—she was courted in every land by a king or a beggar or a singer or a fighter, and to every suitor she’d agree to be mated (Oh, all right) but on each wedding night she held her husband off from her with a straight arm and demanded he first tell her plainly where the Most Precious Thing could be found—whereupon he vanished away, or became something different, a moth, a stick of wood, a wave on the water.
“Because they want not to answer me,” she told Dar Oakley. “Cowards.”
The last of those who won her bore her away to a dank pavilion by a golden river, but it was the same—when she questioned him there, he became an Eel and tried to slither away into the mud. Fox Cap caught the Eel before it disappeared and made it speak to her. What kind of thing is it, the Most Precious Thing, where is it, where can it be found?
It’s nothing, the Eel said through its mouthful of teeth.
Tell me the truth, she said.
Very well—it’s everything.
Fox Cap said that one of those things must not be true, but the Eel said, Oh yes they were, both, and would she please let go?
Fox Cap squeezed harder. An Eel is a hard beast to hold on to. She said, Not till you tell where it can be found.
The Eel gasped and squirmed. Nowhere but in a vast land down under, it said, not hidden in the egg of the Crow of this world. Then it wriggled away.
“The Crow of this world?” Dar Oakley asked her.
“In this world there’s only one,” Fox Cap said, as though she now knew it to be so. “There’s only one of anything. It’s only come upon again and again, and seems to be many.”
“I see,” Dar Oakley said, but really he only sees this now, when he tells about it himself: that in a land where signs are the only things, you needed only one of each, one castle, king, lover, rival, child, animal, fish, bird, tooth, eye, cup, bed. They were nothing but what they meant, and it was what they meant that changed. That was why he could eat the livers of giant fallen fighters one after another in land after land here and not be nourished, never be full and never empty. Every cup Fox Cap drank from was as full after she drained it as before, and her thirst never grew more or less. It was that land. They stood on its far hills, watching the sly sun go down.
As on every night now he was faced with a choice, to sleep unsteadily squatting on the ground like a Quail in the shelter of Fox Cap’s mantle, or to go alone to the grove of Hazel (there was always a grove of Hazel) and listen nightlong to the leaves whispering to one another about him. Fox Cap never seemed to sleep at all.
“Why do they want to keep this thing from you, if they don’t need it themselves?” Dar Oakley asked. “I just don’t understand.” All these questions he had been forbidden to ask on the barrow’s top in the moonlight, but he would ask them now, or be no help at all to her.
“This is what the Singer told me,” Fox Cap said. “If this thing were ours, and the living never died, then no more kings and queens and cowherds and fighters would come down to this land. Their number would never grow. They would lose the homage and the gifts they get. Who’d care to remember them? Finally they’d be forgotten.”
The sun seemed to have gone down as far as it wished to and had begun climbing back up, its red face cooling as it rose.
“It’s why they steal babies,” Fox Cap said. “Why the ones in the tangled forest tricked me to follow them, and wanted me never to leave. You remember. They wish us to be with them: ever more of us.”
“Well, one day you will be.”
“Maybe not,” Fox Cap said, and laid her staff alongside her where she sat. “Maybe not.”
“But why,” Dar Oakley said, “if it’s better here—fighting and feasting all the time, no one has to dig the dirt,
the killed ones up and drinking and eating, ever and ever . . .”
“It’s not better here,” Fox Cap said with cold certainty. “They say it is, but not even heroes want to come here till they must, and when they must, they weep. It’s not better. That’s why we mourn for the dead, Crow: not only for our loss but for theirs.”
The sun was high.
“Let’s go on,” Fox Cap said.
There was no way to a vast land down under that Fox Cap could find. Dar Oakley was ashamed to have been so little help to her, as little as if he had been only listening to her tell the tale of what she did and suffered. No help at all: not until they had lost all hope, and turned from the North at last.
“I’m old,” Dar Oakley said. “I give up.”
“We’re both old,” said Fox Cap, leaning on her staff. Her back was bent. “Old as old.”
They walked again in the great gray Beech-wood, where the yellow leaves fell with a soft click one by one, and there was no other sound.
“Well, that’s peculiar,” Dar Oakley said. “That wasn’t here before.”
“We were never here before,” Fox Cap said. “Nowhere here ever before.”
“Look,” he said.
In the middle of the forest was a tree taller than any other. It was the middle of the forest only because it was so tall and there was no other like it: its singleness made the woods extend from it lone and level in all directions. Its smooth trunk, with never a branch on it, rose up to and then through the dense crowns of the smaller trees, and its top couldn’t be seen.
“I wonder,” Dar Oakley said.
He lifted his wings, made the downstroke as his aching legs pushed him aloft. He heard Fox Cap behind call to him. He got above the lesser trees and still the one tree rose up, not yet branching, and Dar Oakley thought he hadn’t the strength to reach the top—but then from out of the cloudy fog the lowest branches of the Beech at last appeared, as large themselves as full-grown trees. But what rested there, supported by them as by a hand and fingers outstretched? It was like the surfaces that People would lay in their houses over the bare dirt: a floor. He was under it. He stopped at a great branch, feet skidding on the smooth beech bark, and grew ever more certain what, or where, he had come to. Far, far down at the tree’s base he saw Fox Cap and heard faintly her call, but it was no use to answer her; she’d never be able to climb this tree to reach him.