Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

  He was looking into a still forest pool when he found himself, his reflected face ringed by fallen leaves: a Crow of this place. He seemed to be looked at by that face, as though by another Crow, who knew something about him that he didn’t; and in a flash of certainty he knew that in truth he wasn’t this Crow whose face he saw, or hadn’t always been. He had been another Crow in other times; and there were times when he had not been at all.

  Whenever Dar Oakley finds himself—as by now he has done over and over—he finds more of himself than he found the time before.

  As he looked into the still water at the strange Crow looking back, he remembered crossing the sea with the Terns, the Brother in Hell; he remembered Fox Cap; he remembered the clatter of the golden horsemen, and the archer who shot him. He remembered that so-black bird who had looked down on him in the wind and rain the last time he died; the trees around him now were just as brilliant as they had been on that day, but he didn’t think that this was then, or that these trees were those.

  A Frog’s face broke the surface of the little pond he looked into, and shattered Dar Oakley’s reflection. With a long, strong bill he stabbed it, shook it, and swallowed it down.

  And he remembered the Most Precious Thing: the reason he was here, the reason he had been anywhere he had been, and why in time to come he would be where he would be. Something about the cold Frog in his throat had brought it back: how he had taken that cold nothing in his bill, and fled with it, and lost it. Yet never parted from it, or ever could.

  Nothing.

  He heard Crows then, and lifted his head. Crows of his own lineage, far off, repeating calls from even farther off, making known that something of interest was up, all those of the lineage who heard should come see. And bearing his new burden of memory he rose up, calling his own call.

  There hadn’t been lineages among the Crows where he had come from in Ka, but here there were, and he knew his own: his children and their children, their mothers and the mothers of their mothers, their mothers’ brothers and sisters too, all of them forming a stripe like a silver brook or stream seen from high up at evening, a stream bound to other streams from which it sprang or into which it flowed, all of them different but part of a whole that was distinct from Crows in general: this whole was a clan, his clan. There had not been clans either in the realm where (he now knew) he’d once lived, where he’d first been born.

  He sensed as much as saw movement along the march of tall trees, Crows going toward the far callers somewhere daywise-of-billwise. After following for a time he caught up with one and called her name. She settled in a tall Maple and awaited him.

  “Fighters returning from a raid,” she said. “Crow clan. Bringing captives.”

  The People of that place and time belonged to clans and lineages too, clans named for beings other than themselves, beings they took as their sign or symbol: a thing Crows never did and couldn’t really understand. But there are hard and easy ways to get a living, and to be held in honor by People is one of the easy ones. Crows profited from the Crow clan, though Turtles got nothing from the Turtle clan except to have their shells turned into drums.

  “How far?” Dar Oakley asked.

  “Let’s go see,” said the other, whose name was Gray Feather; she was named for a hurt primary that after molt always grew in again gray, not black.

  There hadn’t been names in the lands of Ka where Dar Oakley’d begun; Crows hadn’t possessed one each, not till Dar Oakley learned the language of People and found out about names. He remembered all that now, the story of it; he recalled it, which is to him as though he hears a call from a place he once inhabited and a being once himself, and answers.

  The triangulating calls of the widespread lineage now were drawing the Crows to a People trail that wound along beside a fast-tumbling shallow river, sometimes closer to it, sometimes farther. As the People moved along it the calls followed, until Crows were in the trees along the way and keeping the People in sight. It was easy to tell which of the People were Crow clan and which were captives: the Crow clan wore necklaces, skirts, and leggings of Deer’s skin, black Crow feathers in their hair, where the captives were naked, filthy, hurt, and stumbling under heavy burdens. The clan fighters took notice of the Crows around them, and raised weapons to salute them: their own birds, coming to welcome them.

  “There,” said Gray Feather to Dar Oakley, and leapt to a new branch to see better. “That one, look.”

  One of the captives, slight and young it seemed, had fallen behind the others as the path rose steeply through a rocky place. He seemed to be hardly able to take steps, and had almost come to a halt when another captive higher up on the trail noticed him. Though burdened himself, he turned back toward the failing one. When the clan fighters saw this, that he might go help the younger one, they beat him back with their heavy clubs, nearly driving him to his knees. Two fighters went to the slighter captive, pulled off his burdens (peltry, skins, other captured stuff), and when he staggered and reached out for help to stand, a fighter lifted his club high and with a blow to his head killed him. Anyway he lay still. The Crows who saw it fell silent a moment. The fighter who’d struck the captive took a stone knife and cut at his head, and with a cry pulled off the hair and the skin and waved it aloft. The other fighters cheered. They kicked and shoved the body to the edge of the trail and off into the gullied rocks below; it rolled a distance, arms flopping will-lessly, and came to a stop, supine, the bleeding head downward. They loaded his burdens onto the tall captive, the one who had turned back perhaps to help; he bent under the weight, but bore it. The fighters pushed the captives back into line and started again up the path.

  The Crows—who had expected all this—watched the fighters and the other captives pass one by one up the trail. One fighter cupped his hand by his mouth and gave a call in imitation of the Crow call that means Come see what’s here, and though most of the Crows couldn’t hear that in it, it didn’t matter: they were here, and they knew why. The dead captive’s eyes were open, his mouth open too and his tongue exposed. His many wounds bled freshly. The Crows had no rivals for the wealth they looked down on, and that was because of the long patronage of the Crow clan of the People, which they had elicited just by being the Crows that People wanted and needed.

  Dar Oakley had taught them that, over time: how People could provide, if you understood them. And looking down this day at the thing caught in the rockfall below, he thought how he had learned those tricks and taught them to Crows in other times and places too, times and places and Crows that he’d forgotten till now.

  “Hungry?” Gray Feather asked him.

  “Never not,” Dar Oakley said.

  A day later the slow-moving war party and its captives reached their home place. Dar Oakley had lingered at the cadaver of the dead captive for a time, gorging with the rest, but the Ravens had come, and then the Vultures, and he’d grown restless and filled with thoughts. He went on, and reached the Crow People village just when the walkers did. He flew up into a tall Pine, too far for them to see him, though he could see them. All the People—men, women, and children—were standing in two long lines before the palisade of tall stakes. When the fighters came in sight, they cheered and waved the sticks and the hide whips and weapons they held. The strutting fighters came in, pulling their captives with ropes tied around their necks. When the wealth they carried had been displayed and exclaimed over, the captives were tugged resisting into line. The gantlet—those two lines of People—wasn’t run, though run is the word you hear now: rather the captives were jerked along slowly by the ropes around their necks, so that everyone had a chance to strike at them or prod them with burning brands, on their backs, their arms and legs—but not their hands, or their faces. If a captive flinched, or staggered, or cried out, he’d be hit and whipped and burned all the more. Dar Oakley and the Crows of the lineage—those that didn’t shy from People or dislike Dogs or fire—had seen all of this done before: it was what happened when captives were
brought back. The noise, People and Dogs and drums, was terrific.

  That tall one, the one who on the trail had turned back to help the faltering one, walked with head high and eyes forward, seeming not to notice the crowd he passed through, shaking the blows from his body as though they were annoying insects. Dar Oakley saw now what he’d missed before: two fingers of one hand had recently been torn off, the stumps still bloody. When the People shouted at him, he responded to them, nothing Dar Oakley could hear, but spoken as though he were conversing with friends—it was a People way of speaking, though not while blood ran down backs and legs. Is that your kinswoman? Is that the hardest she can hit? Sometimes the People laughed at what he said, not in scorn (Dar Oakley can’t really describe in Crow words these subtleties of human talk that he sensed) but amused, as though he mocked one of them to amuse the rest. Still they went on thrashing him.

  When they reached the open place in the palisade, one of the captives fell. The People descended on him, giving him the same kicks they gave their Dogs, beating and beating him with fierce and incomprehensible rage. When the others were taken within, this one was left, twisted and still.

  Now the Crows—more had come in—took a real interest. The lineage of these Crows was numerous; winter was coming on, when food would be scarce. That was the sum of Crow thinking.

  The Crows didn’t witness it—by then they were off asleep—but within the town the torture and humiliation of the naked captives went on through the night, with drumming and fires. Another of the captives died under it, or was killed as useless to his captors. But at least one survived: the one with two fingers torn away.

  What the Crows couldn’t know and wouldn’t anyway have pondered was why People treated captives in the way they did. When later Dar Oakley learned the reason and tried to explain it to the Crows, they mostly didn’t believe him: those captives had been taken and brought back to be replacements for sons and brothers and sisters and children who had earlier been seized from the Crow clan in raids by other lineages, other clans, other Peoples. The captured ones were to become the ones who had been taken; the ones that the captives’ own clan had earlier killed.

  The mourning families—the women, mostly—decided which of the captives would be spared to become People of their clan, and which would be killed and thrown to the Dogs, the Vultures, and the Crows. Which was greater, a woman’s longing for revenge, or her grief at her loss? Those who sustained the tortures well were mostly permitted to live.

  The tall, proud one: after they’d done more to him, waiting for him to break, they ordered him to sing—insult after injury. He sang in his own language, and they yelled and mocked him, but they listened, too, and called for more. So he sang differently; he pointed at this one and that one, and the Crow People laughed at the ones who were made fun of by his words. Then his song changed again. The People listening grew quiet, and some of the women wept. At last the eldest of the women stood, and with a wave sent away the tormentors, the men and the children.

  Then everything changed. Dar Oakley would be told of it later: how the captive was taken into the lodge and fed and cared for, his atrocious wounds treated. His new mother put food in his mouth with her own hands, bound his wounds with poultices. When he was healed he was within a new family, of a new clan, who fed him and loved him and taught him their speech and their ways. He could only lose that proffered love by resisting it, by holding on to what he had been, refusing the menial children’s tasks he must begin his new life with.

  The family that this captive earned by his courage and his submission had once had a son taken in a raid by others from elsewhere; that son might be dead or he might not be, but he was lost to them. Now they had a son again, a son restored, just as beautiful, and wiser; a son who would in time lose the knowledge that he had ever been anyone else.

  That was why the captives were treated as they were: in the madness of torture they’d lose every loyalty, however deep, every memory of home they had; die as themselves so that new selves could be made, selves of this place, this lineage.

  Well, Dar Oakley knew; Dar Oakley understood.

  For a sign, they cut off one of his ears, the right ear that the first son had once lost in a fight. From then on their name for him was One Ear, as it had been the name of the first.

  When later he told Dar Oakley this story, he’d flick the stub of the ear with one of the remaining fingers of his right hand, and grin.

  Because of those mangled fingers, he could never be much of a weapon wielder; but tall and brave and cool though he was, he had little interest in fighting anyway. He’d be a singer of songs and a storyteller. Among the hundreds of stories he could tell were ones he’d heard as a child in his first family, though he never revealed that. And one—the story of a Crow who went in search of Nothing—was one he’d learn from Dar Oakley. Dar Oakley, on his branch up above the children and the elders, would listen to it told, told again and changed, and he would not always know where the story ceased and he began, whether he heard it in Ka or acted it in Ymr.

  That first winter after Dar Oakley found himself was a hard one. It began before the leaves fell and piled snow on snow that never melted. Dar Oakley and Gray Feather in the shelter of a dense Pine kept watch on the People trails, waiting for the hunters on their wide Bear-feet to come crossing over the snow, perhaps pulling a toboggan and a dead Moose the Crows might get something of. They sat together motionless, saving energy.

  “What was his name?” Dar Oakley asked. It was in this season that Gray Feather’s mate had been lost.

  “Darkwood,” she said. “It was the name his mother had, and others of his family.”

  That was a difference here from the lands where Dar Oakley had first thought of names. There, every Crow had had his own. Here Gray Feather’s daughters had young with her name—Grayfeather—though they had no gray feather at all.

  “I think,” she said, “if there is a name, a lost Crow is easier to remember.”

  “I know,” he said. And yet it seemed to him that it might be as true to say that names make it easier to forget: the name remains and the rest is lost.

  Snow drifted noiselessly through the Pine branches.

  “Why do we have them, anyway?” Dar Oakley asked. “Names. Who thought of that?” He said it just to keep himself from telling his own tale, which would have set him apart from Gray Feather, from these Crows, his clan, whether they believed his story or didn’t, a story from elsewhere and far away.

  “Ask the Ravens,” Gray Feather said. “It’s said they know more about Crows than Crows themselves know.”

  “Look,” Dar Oakley said. Below, seeming black as Bears against the snow, Crow People hunters came tugging an empty sled.

  The hard freezes of that winter cracked the rocks above the trail the People took along the river, and when heavy rains fell in spring, the split granite loosened and slid down over the trail and the slope below. Mud covered the bare bones of the captive that in autumn the Crows and others had eaten. All this the overwintering Crows observed. Then on a green-flecked day Dar Oakley on his rounds came upon the captive who had become one of the Crow clan, there at that spot. He climbed stones, he prodded the ground with a digging stick here and there. He stopped, baffled, and sat unmoving, head low.

  Dar Oakley knew what he wanted, and where it was. He flew near. There was no reason not to help.

  First he had to get this one’s attention, the one now called One Ear. It might be that he was Crow clan now, but he hadn’t yet caught the trick of observing Crows and being guided by them. Dar Oakley took a low branch and called; he settled lower, on a rock above the trail. At last One Ear saw that he was being spoken to, and stood. Dar Oakley flew farther on—One Ear hadn’t been searching in the right place. He stopped now and then and waited for One Ear to clamber over the rocks. He alighted finally at the place where a pale bone protruded from the rubble, though he didn’t choose to remain there when One Ear saw and ran stumbling to the place. He wa
tched instead from afar, going off now and then in search of food, returning to see that One Ear had gathered bones, more bones each time, some broken, strung with hard tendon and bearing scraps of black flesh: many but not all of the bones that had held that captive together. No longer useful for that or for anything.

  What was it People wanted with bones? Had he known once and forgotten? One Ear squatting beside these had begun to sing; he took from his pouch some powdery stuff and with his spit made a paste that he drew over his cheeks in broad black stripes. He placed the bones in a Deer-skin he must have brought just for this, and put in other things, a stone knife, a belt of beads, dried meats. Then, still singing, he lifted it all and went upward away from the trail and a long way into the forest, to where stones had been piled—it was clear to Dar Oakley that they had been piled and had not gathered there by chance or the stones’ own will. One Ear laid the bones down, and pushed aside stones to reveal a hollow in the earth. With great tenderness, as though laying a child in its bed, he put the Deer-skin there.

  He rolled the stones again over it, his cache—but why? No one would seek it out to eat it now—and he sat in silence there beside it. Dar Oakley was sure no one of the Crow clan of the People knew of this deed or this place, or ever was to know.

  He began to speak then, words in a language Dar Oakley hadn’t heard before—he understood some of the Crow clan’s language, but this was different. And yet as One Ear spoke, and the spring evening closed around and the last of the melting snow breathed in the Hemlocks, Dar Oakley felt drawn once more into that realm Ymr where he had used to go. He remembered bones: the bones of the Saint that had spoken to him in the Brothers’ oratory, the bones that Fox Cap and her People had brought back to put in the houses made for them alone. Fox Cap’s own bones, cleaned and lying under the sun, her and not her.