Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

  The Brother was sure the Crow understood him, and understood more the more he was spoken to—why wouldn’t he? And so when the Crow had first come cautiously to the Brother’s window he had talked to it, and gone on talking, and the Crow had listened and learned. The Brother would have gone on talking anyway; talking too much and too loudly was a besetting fault of his, as he was often reminded by his Confessor. He couldn’t, though, perceive what Dar Oakley said back to him—the Brother recognized only the words Dar Oakley could say in the Brother’s own tongue: the names of a few things or notions, and then later the nicknames the Brother had assigned to the others in the Abbey. He laughed when Dar Oakley cawed a belittling nickname at a Brother passing, and then he’d press his long forefinger to his lips, which meant silence.

  “Who made you?” he asked Dar Oakley. Who had no answer. “God made you,” the Brother said. “Why did God make you?” Dar Oakley had no answer for that, either, but they seemed to be the questions he wanted answers to, the answers he had come here to learn: Who am I, and why am I here?

  God, he learned to say, a simple vocable. God was the answer, and when he gave it, the Brother fed him, and stroked his black head, and smiled on him. Which made Dar Oakley sure that there was more to know, more about himself, if he could find the way to get it.

  There were many beings the Brothers spoke to and talked about that Dar Oakley couldn’t see, whose names and natures he knew only from the Brother’s unending talk. They weren’t present, only remembered; or they were present, but not to Crows. It was for one of these that the Brothers ate fish; for another that they gathered on the day of the white stone and sang. The Brother called on one or another of the beings to help him in his work, or in his annoyances; he thanked them when a task went well, or something fortunate befell him. He begged some to protect him from others, saying the same few words over and over to attract their attention, his two hands wringing each other.

  This is what it is to be of the People. It isn’t enough to get sustenance and outdo others and evade predators, engender young, stay alive. Whatever band or tribe or nation of People is yours, some number among you have to do work that protects the others from threats they can’t see; that ensures their safety as they pass from life into death; that earns the favor of beings who can change the weather and raise the winds, stop the sun in the sky to light a path. At the Abbey, Dar Oakley came to remember that he actually already knew this about People, though not how he had learned it; and he has described it all to me, though of course I know it too, we all know it.

  Day by day in the Brother’s talk, Dar Oakley learned. He learned that the Brothers had come here across the sea from an island country (this meant nothing to Dar Oakley) and they had built their settlement themselves, laid stone on stone and yes, drunk pond water and eaten roots until their sanctity and their selflessness and the blessings and protections they had to offer had won them converts and tribute. That was how Dar Oakley’s Brother had come to the Abbey, a hostage to his family’s fortunes: because he lived here, sang and prayed with the Brothers, his kin would stay strong, and defeat their enemies.

  The Brothers had brought their Saint with them when they came. The Brother told Dar Oakley the Saint was the source of all the good they did and would do, the force that had won to the true faith the pagans of this place, who had before given their dead to Crows and worshipped trees.

  The only reason Dar Oakley can repeat all this to me, so full of things he had no conception of then, is that the Brother told it to him so often: looking up from his copy-work or his book to repeat some sentence of it, as though it ran constantly like a brook through his mind and could spill out in freshets any time. And though Dar Oakley couldn’t attach anything single or definite to certain words that appeared again and again in the Brother’s talk, they became his to have and to taste as each dropped singly into his mind (where alone he could say them). He loved them: Faith. Prayer. Saint. Heaven. Hell. Words are greater than meanings, and can live without them.

  On another winter day they stood together, Dar Oakley and the Brother, before the little oratory built in the center of the cloister in the center of the Abbey in the center of the inmost of three concentric ring-walls that marked in turn the Holy, the Holier, and the Holiest parts of the Abbey. The Brother was engaged in sweeping the leaves that had fallen there. The oratory resembled to Dar Oakley a small house of the People, with a door in one wall to go in by and in the opposite wall a window. But it also resembled a pile of stones, which was what composed it, stones laid on stones (the Brothers laid stones on stones as Beavers make dams, as Crows weave nests) rising to a peak and somehow not falling in.

  He thought he would like to see the Saint who lived in there. It was dim, and little could be seen inside through the narrow door. The Brother, seeing him pry and study, went to the door, drew up his skirts, and knelt on one knee a moment; then after looking around to make sure he was alone (Dar Oakley could tell that), he went inside, motioning with a hand to bring the Crow along.

  Dar Oakley stepped to the door. As he stood, gathering courage to go in, he felt within him another door in another place, a door at which he had once hesitated, a door that he had gone in by, after which—it seemed to him—he had not ever truly come back out.

  He went in.

  There was no other Brother there, no one but his Brother now kneeling again before a wide stone table on which something sat: something bright, something that glowed in a bit of sunlight through the barred window. Stones of an impossible radiance, red and blue and green, drank in and poured out the light, seeming almost to be in motion as Dar Oakley came nearer. He felt a lust almost comical in its profundity for these bright things; his bill opened, as though he could take one in it from where he stood. The Brother, with head lowered and hands together, was whispering as into someone’s ear, so low Dar Oakley could hear only a few words: a real friend, he said, and just one friend, and please.

  He stood then, and motioned gravely to the Crow. He went to the thing on the table, and after making again the gesture of the right hand, he took hold of the thing and pulled it in two. As Dar Oakley can now say even in the language of Ka—because long ago he brought the words into it—the thing on the table was a box with a top.

  “She’s here,” the Brother whispered.

  Here? There wasn’t room in the thing even for a People’s child. Dar Oakley lifted himself to the table, to the rim of the jeweled box, and looked down inside.

  On a woven cloth were laid gray bones: an arm still attached with stringy tendons to parts of a hand; ribs, fallen away from a spine; a brown-stained skull without a jaw. Bits and pieces.

  “She,” breathed the Brother.

  “She’s dead,” said Dar Oakley.

  “Blessed Saint,” said the Brother.

  “Dead as dead,” said Dar Oakley.

  There was a sound of feet then, several, shuffling across the still-unswept cloister toward the oratory. The Brother looked up in terror, to the door, to the barred window—and then he took hold of Dar Oakley on the box’s rim and pressed him down inside. He closed the lid before the Crow could put out a wing or bill to stop him.

  It was entirely dark. As any daytime beast will do in utter darkness, he didn’t move or make a sound. He could hear the Brothers entering the oratory, the muttering of their voices all together. He wondered if they would open the box and find him there, which surely would not be good for the Brother or for himself, either. It was hard to breathe; he couldn’t remain in the airless box long and live; he couldn’t fight his way out. He could only listen.

  He listened: the Brothers’ voices came and went away like birdcalls blown away in a wind.

  Then a different voice spoke, very near him. If he hadn’t become by now nothing but an ear and another ear, he wouldn’t have heard it.

  You, it said.

  Startled, Dar Oakley moved his feet in the mess of bones, which rattled faintly—surely that was all he had heard.

&nb
sp; You, it said again. Living thing. What do you want?

  Hush, Dar Oakley whispered. If he weren’t suffocating, he’d have said, I’m not one you can help: but he stayed silent, bill open to get the last of the air. He felt he was turning over in space, though he knew he wasn’t.

  Living thing, the voice said. Listen to me.

  He had nothing to reply. He listened.

  You will be blessed, the voice said. You will betray.

  What did that word mean? He thought he’d heard it.

  You will sin.

  You will be damned.

  You will have mercy.

  You will die.

  You will never die.

  All these words he knew, words kept in a realm made of nothing else. With each word the voice opened that realm farther, and yet the voice, if it was a voice, was wrong to suppose that it was his realm. He thought of explaining this, but there was no air left for talk, and Dar Oakley had ceased to hear, or to breathe, or to know anything.

  Then the lid of the box was lifted away, light and air poured in, and in a spasm of returning life Dar Oakley broke free, scrambling upward and disordering the bones beneath him as he went. All the other Brothers were gone. Go, the Brother whispered. Out the narrow door of that place and into the golden air he went, up over the cloister and the church-top. Away, trying to shed that voice and its words like rain from his slick plumage. Soon, far off, he heard Crows, making sense.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Dar Oakley had never meant or really wanted to stay and live in that stone place; he never thought of himself as belonging to the white flock of Brothers, or as residing there. His flock was the one of Crows, and he always assumed he’d have a place among them whenever he returned. And when he did, yes, the welcome was loud, and the story was told again of the Horse, and the one of the Eagle-Owl, and others of the old days. But as he came less often and for shorter times, his own brothers and sisters began to class him with the People and not with themselves. As though something of the People, the smell of their fires or food, clung to his plumage, and marked him out.

  “Anyway,” Va Thornhill said to him. “We’ve got our own People now.”

  Dar Oakley noted how that we had been used. “Oh?”

  “They provide,” said Va, with an air of smirk. The Crows around him laughed and exchanged looks. “Better than Wolves.”

  “They are Wolves,” said Fin Blue-Eye, at that moment alighting. “They name themselves that.” Dar Oakley had taught Fin the People word for those beasts, Wolves.

  There were far Crow calls then, coming from the edge of the forest that stretched far up into the mountains and on to where these Crows did not go.

  “Ah,” said Kon Eaglestail. “That’ll be them.”

  “Come see,” Va Thornhill said to Dar Oakley.

  It was a fog-shrouded day. Flying took caution. The Biggers set out over the vanished fields, and Dar Oakley followed, keeping watch for trees that might snake a limb toward you before you saw. People, he thought, were afraid of fog too, and of what might come out of it.

  Just as he thought this, something did appear ahead. Along a path that People used, some being was emerging from the trees into the open land. It was large—very large—taller than a Bear walking on two legs. The Crows, who had come down onto the branches of a shaggy Hazel, were crying in welcome.

  What was coming out of the forest was a gigantic bird, its huge head and heavy bill and staring eyes alarming. Wings drooping, it stumbled along on shod People feet as though uncertain of the ground. There could be no such huge bird in the world—and yet Dar Oakley suspected that once upon a time, in a different place, he had come upon one, and been chased and nearly caught by it. The Crow of that world. A swift fear gripped him.

  Behind the bird a different beast came out of the forest and the fog: one with horns on its head like a wild Bull and fur like a Bear, in fact a Bear with a People face and beard, an ax carried in his bare People hand and resting on his hairy shoulder.

  The flock was calling to these beings, laughing at them and at Dar Oakley at the same time. The Wolves! they cried. Our Wolves!

  The being with the ax raised it to them in welcome. The bird-being shook its wings and seemed to beck.

  Dar Oakley laughed too. It was People, of course it was, making themselves appear to be something they weren’t, something other People would fear.

  Three then four more People, not appearing as other sorts of beings but only themselves in the common cloth and leathers, came following the beast-People. They carried clumsy unraveling bundles, and were waved on by the Bull-Bear. Ahead the winged one stumbled—it seemed to have a hard time seeing the ground it walked on—and tumbled over, coming in two: the human part crawled out from the hollow straw and wood part. His crew jeered—that was easy to see—and the one who had been the bird set off dragging his bird part after him.

  From away up in the forest came Crow calls. Far first and then nearer. A Crow could locate those calls and know just where they were coming from.

  “Those are our own,” Va Thornhill said. “There, and there. Come on. They have something.”

  “What?” Dar Oakley asked.

  “Come see,” Va Thornhill said, and clacked his bill three times in anticipation. The Crows were already heading up the path into the woods that the weird People had come down.

  “Long ago,” Va Thornhill said as he and Dar Oakley flew and rested, “there was that Crow who learned a thing. Learned that People are unlike other beings—they often kill one another.”

  “But they never eat the ones they kill,” Dar Oakley said.

  “Yes! So if you make yourself a friend of People—”

  “Yes,” said Dar Oakley. The fog was lifting around him, the clouds lying on the earth returning to the sky: the world coming clear.

  “Look,” said Va Thornhill.

  Down on the ground, off the path that the People used, pale on the wet black ground, were People, naked and unmoving: one, two, and a child or small one. The Crows who had called, and Dar Oakley’s gang coming in, were closing on them, but cautious and calling. Dead, yes, all. No threats. No eaters. All ours. Here, this way.

  “See?” Va Thornhill said. One of the People, one who lay faceup, had been chopped open. It wasn’t hard to guess that their wrappings and all that they carried had been taken by the band that the Crows had called “our Wolves.”

  “It’s good!” Fin Blue-Eye called. “Let’s eat!” One by one and then in numbers the Crows went down onto the bodies. Va Thornhill and Kon Eaglestail surveyed them with pride.

  “How did you know?” Dar Oakley asked. “What made you think that these would be here, killed by those others?”

  “You don’t get it,” Kon Eaglestail said. “It was we who gave them the news that these three were on the path.”

  “Their prey,” Va Thornhill said. “It’s what they do.”

  The ruckus at the corpses was getting louder, and would soon bring in other eaters.

  “And you—you’re their Ravens,” Dar Oakley said. “Ravens guide Wolves to prey. So do you.”

  “We, Dar Oakley,” said Va Thornhill. “We.” He seemed to Dar Oakley so swollen with self-satisfaction that he might burst.

  “But why do these Wolves make themselves appear to be beings that they aren’t?”

  The Biggers made gestures of ignorance or indifference. “Frighten the ones they hunt?” Fin Blue-Eye guessed.

  “Who cares?” Va Thornhill said. “Let’s eat while there’s wealth left.”

  They fell on the dead one lying faceup, the easiest to enter and already much dug into. As he grabbed and bit the cold flesh, Dar Oakley thought of the Brother, who had told him to give his fellow Crows good counsel. Likely they wouldn’t listen to him, even if he knew what good counsel was. But the thought of the Brother brought into his mind an image of the dish of stones on the floor of his cell, with only one last dark stone left this day to be moved: and Dar Oakley realized, with a tickle of disc
omfort and hilarity, that he was eating flesh on a Friday.

  Only one of those People who had met with the Wolves gang had been able to run away. Near exhaustion from fear and flight through the dark and cold, he brought the news of the attack to the Abbey. He told them what he had seen, a huge bird, a Bull-Bear—beings not men, fog-demons perhaps. He told the Brothers that he and his family, good Christians, had been on their way to this Abbey, bringing with them the youngest son, who was to be given to the Brothers, an oblation; they’d brought other gifts too, now all stolen; and the boy dead with his parents. The Brothers armed themselves with a tall cross and went out pulling a cart to bring back the dead ones for burial. The Crows fled at their approach, watching resentfully from afar as the Brothers knelt to pray and then wrapped the poor despoiled bodies in cloths and bore them away, weeping over the blond child whom God had allowed to be taken.

  All of which the Brother related to Dar Oakley, more than once.

  “Brigands,” he said, mopping his brow with his sleeve. “Outlaws. Thieves and murderers.”

  The Brother was given the task of digging a grave for the boy, another for the parents. He stood leaning on his shovel while two of the People who lived nearby and depended on the Abbey for their livelihoods dug. Around them, beneath the earth, were the Brother’s own father and mother (he’d pointed out to Dar Oakley where they were) and other kin.

  “Men less than men,” he said. “Men who would kill like beasts for gain. Twisted into evil shapes by the beast-souls within. Homo homini lupus.”

  Dar Oakley, up on a stone churchyard cross, nodded when the Brother said these things, cautious and obedient, not sure if the Brother had recognized him among the flock feeding on the dead People. He’d fled away with the others when the Brother had chased them off with his baculus, little stick, not a weapon but standing for a weapon (or for the lack of one). Now he looked down at the long, narrow vacancies the People were making, lined with stones. Where had he seen such work done before? A place for People to hide away their dead ones.