Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

  All around the flock as they went, before, behind, beside, walked the dead: One Ear’s adopted kin, his birth People, many more never known to him alive. Faces always to the West, silent, not strong, but never resting. The new People settlers couldn’t see them, though they would somehow remember them anyway long afterward, when the world had changed and even the forests had changed.

  Dar Oakley could see them. Perhaps because his old friend could, and told him of them; but when One Ear at last stopped walking and lay down for good beside his cold fire, Dar Oakley continued seeing them. Were they following the Crows? Sometimes he’d see some of them standing still, making no progress; or, confused maybe, turned around toward the places they’d come from, where they could no longer go.

  He saw the dead alive. Not in another land where People guess or dream they are, but all around, in the ordinary daylight lands poisoned by the living. So many of them, in their Deer-skins and shell beads, so many. He got used to it. He went on seeing them now and then, one or two or more, for long seasons afterward, though never again One Ear, the teller of stories. Perhaps he was one of those who reached the Sky Gate at last.

  This was the first of the great dyings that Dar Oakley witnessed.

  After many seasons passed, winter, summer, the Crows of Dar Oakley’s grand flock decided, Crow by Crow, that they had no interest in moving any farther, or in listening to Dar Oakley’s ideas and plans. They were satisfied with where they were. Successive generations spread daywise, billwise, and otherwise into flocks and demesnes, and claimed freeholds in the ancient way. That took I’d guess a century or two, and by the end of it they lived as Crows have always lived, and no trace and few memories of their long migration remained.

  In those demesnes were People, People in clothes, with Oxen and wagons, who at winter’s end turned the soil in long brown rows where Crows could hunt for grubs. The Pigs and Sheep that the People kept for food and wool sometimes fed Crows, too. Crows ceased to be feared, mostly; on the lanes and byways that the People made from house to village the children walking together counted the Crows that they saw:

  One for sorrow

  Two for mirth

  Three for a wedding

  Four for a birth

  Beyond the planted lands were still forests choked in underbrush, as they had been in the high lands and glens where the Wolves gang terrorized travelers; what Crows didn’t know was that these impassable forests weren’t ancient but new, the result of the settlers not understanding how the former People had burned the undergrowth yearly to keep it down. Untamed, the settlers called the forests, wild, primeval, not knowing they had themselves made them. And they set about cutting them, for lumber and potash and the land that they stood on. Dar Oakley watched trees being girdled, not one or two here and there as One Ear’s people had done it but in great numbers, and when they fell and the stumps rotted, they were burned where they sat or were pulled away by groaning Oxen. Farms were begun. They separated the land with long fences of stone or sticks, they gathered honey from skeps, they ground apples for drink. (It’s a strange thing, Dar Oakley says: though he’s sure he remembers raiding Beehives in his first land, eating sweet woolly Honeybees and getting stung, tasting honey on his tongue so sweet it burned, Crows in this land never did and never have.)

  Content to be retired from his long generalship, Dar Oakley fell back, along with the descendants of his former followers, into immemorial Crow life: feuding, poking around, stealing, taunting Owls. Lolling in the hot sun. Gossip. Food. Nests.

  Love.

  Kits (Dar Oakley told me) thought this was the hardest thing about too much life: that you lose mates. Outlive them, one after another. If your mate’s not killed, he dies old, but you still remain to mourn, mourn for this lost one more than you ever did for any lost one before—or anyway, each time it seems so. You know it will happen so again, a grief piled upon you over and over, and you decide to have no more, just live single among Crow friends as the Saints did, and for seasons at a stretch that was what Dar Oakley did. But you can’t just stop. You can’t, not forever. Kits could only stop by deciding to cease living altogether.

  “Those yours?” he asked a Crow who’d been watching the games of young Crows, this year’s and last.

  “Some, I think,” said the other. “That one with the spriggy head feathers. I think one of mine just had that one, but maybe that was a different one a time ago.”

  “Well, seasons pass, you forget,” Dar Oakley said.

  “They’ll be mated soon,” the other Crow said. “Young of their own.”

  How beautiful they were, the older ones teaching the younger, the younger cautious or bold, showing already the sort of Crows they would grow up to be. They played at dropping a stick from a height so that another could catch it, fly up, and drop it in turn, to be caught again: but they’d invented playing the game in a group, where players circled around the stick as it fell, competing to be the catcher—was it better to be above the stick and dive down, or below and shoot up? Graceful, quick, never touching. The game had been invented a thousand times over, generation after generation: Dar Oakley knew.

  “Getting colder,” the Crow said. “You notice that?”

  “Old Crows feel it,” Dar Oakley said.

  “I smell snow in this air,” the other said. “Maybe good to move.” He pointed his bill in the direction without a name, opposite to billwise.

  Perhaps because of their history of always moving on, the Crows of Dar Oakley’s nation—what remained of it now—had adopted a practice rare though not unknown among Crows: they migrated in winter. They didn’t go far—they weren’t Terns or Hummingbirds driven to cross oceans and hemispheres; they went south by degrees as the cold grew deep in their lands (and this was a time of deep winters) until they reached places they found sufficiently warmer than home, and there they stopped. They filled the Oaks and Elms for a time, and when they felt the first intimations of mating time, they wandered back.

  Dar Oakley liked the idea, which he told younger Crows had been his own. He liked new scenes, new sorts of spaces with occupants strange to him. He’d leave whatever winter quarters the flock established and fly in a wide circle through the lands around, no reason, just pulled by that old un-Crowlike impulse toward solitude, the tug to go where no Crows are: to feel briefly that faint shiver of dissolution.

  There were Crows native to those parts, of course, and Dar Oakley watched them. Even from a distance they knew him for a stranger, and he took care not to arouse hostility. He listened to the talk he could get close enough to hear—he understood most of it, despite the odd soft accents it was cast in. The season was a little advanced here from what it was at home, the cues of day-length and warmth coming sooner; pairing and nest-building had already begun. It was odd to watch it begin while not feeling it in his own body. One among the ones he watched was a female, unmated, just in her first season of maturity, he thought (he was wrong about that). A little small, perhaps—smaller than he was—but brightly black, with an air of self-possession, a cunning eye that reminded him of more than one Crow he’d known, and yet she seemed like no one he’d ever seen before. She was courted by many, the males dashing at one another where she could observe, dancing before her, and she seemed likely to choose one of them, maybe this gallant glossy one or that fat cunning one, but no, none of them pleased her enough. Dar Oakley wondered why. There are Crow confirmed bachelors and Crow spinsters—his Other Older Sister of long ago had been one. He didn’t think this Crow was among them.

  When his flock turned for home that spring in ones and twos and then in crowds, Dar Oakley stayed behind.

  He knew it would be little hard for her, a singleton surrounded by mated pairs. Those who were mated kept her away—a lone Crow isn’t something you want near a nest of just-hatched young—but she didn’t respond to challenges, didn’t seem to notice them, and walked anybody’s freehold as though she were welcome there.

  Which made Dar Oakley pretty sure h
e could let himself down where she foraged among the dandelions, and not spook her. Still, he kept a certain distance. He knew she knew he was there, though she took no notice of him. Whenever he took a few steps closer to her, she went farther off, as though she’d maybe seen something good that way. When they’d played that game enough, he called sharply to her, Hey! Hey you! She didn’t fly; she lifted her head and made a civil response, as he’d known she would. In her own good time she lifted off, and so did he, and when they both touched ground they were side by side.

  “Good day,” he said, and she becked in acknowledgment, unalarmed. “You’re looking black today, I must say.”

  “Thank you,” she said in the soft voice of her flock. “I’ve seen you. You’re one of them, aren’t you, the ones who come in winter?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re all gone,” she said. “You’re late. Your mate will miss you.”

  “Haven’t one,” Dar Oakley said. “No more than you.” This embarrassed her not at all, and her eye held his, waiting. “All those suitors,” he said. “I saw. None of them pleased you?”

  “Oh, they were fine,” she said. “Most. Not all.”

  “No, I’d guess not. But you never made a choice.”

  “The choice wasn’t mine to make,” she said, and when he took a stance of puzzlement, she laughed. “Well, I don’t know how you all make matches where you live. We here have a way.”

  “A way, what way?”

  “A way of being sure.” She lifted her head, looked this way and that, as though afraid to be caught telling secrets—but no, maybe just shy to say. “It’s fine to seem strong and healthy and all that. Most all are. But you want to be sure. Will they always do what you need done, no matter what it is? Can they? You don’t know. So you ask them—or tell them, really.”

  Dar Oakley was visited with a memory, sharp as a thorn, of Kits demanding that he do impossible things to win her favor. “What things do you ask?”

  She told him. If she’d had fingers, she would have counted the tasks out on them. She’d set them for all her suitors, she said, in this spring and the last, and not one had done them; most had refused outright, for all their becking and strutting.

  “Well, they’re very hard, those things,” Dar Oakley said. “Maybe impossible. It makes me think that if you set such hard tasks, maybe you don’t want a mate at all.”

  She took a stance of her own, and let him interpret it: that yes, he was right or was all wrong; that she didn’t know if what he’d said was so, or did know and wasn’t telling.

  Then she turned her attention billwise. “You hear those Crows?” she said. “Let’s go see what they found.”

  But he knew he’d better not. He was still a foreigner here, a Vagrant. He’d keep his distance. He watched her lift off and away.

  It’s possible to think of Crows, or any being with an estrus, as neither male nor female for most of the year. As summer comes and young Crows fledge, that part of Crow life subsides and shrinks—literally for males, whose testes have grown to many times their normal size in mating time—and Crows can become pals with old rivals again, or at least indifferent to them, and new friends can be made.

  It was more often she who sought Dar Oakley out that summer. They walked and ate together. (That sounds like they met for lunch, but what it means is that they spent the daylight hours foraging, since what birds mostly do all day is look for food and eat it. Flight costs a lot.) If others kin to her joined in on a good find, he’d retreat.

  When it grew too hot in the long afternoons of that land of hers to hunt, they’d sit in silence in the deep foliage of a tree he had no name for, and watch the world; or, because she asked, he’d relate the story of his life to her. She didn’t believe the tales, really, and forgot them almost as soon as they were told, but it was a relief to him to tell them at last; she marveled at his journeys and murmured softly for his deaths. Like Desdemona she loved him for the dangers he had passed, and he loved her because she pitied them.

  He told her how, long ago, he had invented names: how names made stories possible, and memories of who did what in times past. She listened with care, though she seemed to think that names were really a game that friends could play just for their own amusement.

  “I’d like a name,” she said. “How is a name got?”

  “You choose it,” Dar Oakley, “or better, it’s chosen for you. You’re named for something you did, or something special about you.”

  “Special?”

  “Something that makes you different from others.”

  She pondered that, but seemed in no hurry to make a choice, or think up names to choose from. Dar Oakley thought, though, and waited for the right one to appear; there could be only one.

  “Well,” she said, “there is one thing. One story of a thing that happened to me.”

  “Yes?”

  “When I was young,” she said, looking not at Dar Oakley but at the world around, “I got the idea that I wanted to go away to a place where no Crows were. A place where no Crows had ever gone.”

  Dar Oakley wondered if he’d heard this aright: words crossing from his own life over into her mouth. “A Crow alone is no Crow at all,” he said.

  “Well, so,” she said, as though she hadn’t heard him pass the old saw, “one day I did set out. I thought I might just go about and study other creatures, and find out how they lived, you see? And one day learn to be no Crow at all.” Now she turned a black eye on him, maybe to see if he listened. “And after I’d gone far enough, so far as to leave all the Crows in the world behind—as I thought—I came to a deep, black, still lake, where I saw a Kingfisher a-sitting on a branch above the water.”

  “A Kingfisher?”

  “Mm-hmm,” she said. “Bright blue, the way they are? With an orange breast? And she was fishing. I watched her fly out over the water, hover, point her big long bill down, and then drop into the water. Gone! Then, quick, she burst up out of the water, and in her bill was a little white fish. She settled back on that branch, and swallowed it.

  “Well, I’d never seen a diving bird before—I said I was young—and I wanted to know just how it was she got that fish. So when she did it again, I watched real close, and what I saw was this: as she dropped to the water, another Kingfisher just like her came up from below the surface, and just when the falling Kingfisher reached the water, her bill touched the bill of the Kingfisher coming up. Right then there was a thrashing and a roiling of the water and the Kingfisher rose up just like before with a fish.”

  “No,” Dar Oakley said.

  “She’d taken it right from the other after a bit of a struggle.”

  “No, no.”

  “So that looked like an easy way to get a meal. I thought I’d try it. It took some courage to just fling myself into the water bill-first. But sure enough, I could see as I came close to the water that a bird was flying up to meet me—only it wasn’t a Kingfisher. . . .”

  “It was a Crow.”

  “It was a Crow like me, bill open like mine, with no fish in it for me.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Well, I couldn’t help it, I went down under the water’s surface, and kept going down and down underneath. It was all dim and sparkly there, like a day when raindrops fall on your eye-haws. I couldn’t see the Crow who lived down there. . . .”

  “The Crow was you.”

  “But the other Kingfisher—the one who brought up the fishes for the one who dove—she was there, and she was angry with me. I knew even though I couldn’t understand her words. I’d no business in her realm, she said; my plumage was the wrong kind, I was a stupid bird who didn’t understand a thing.”

  Dar Oakley thought: Is a story a lie? As hers went on he’d begun to think of One Ear, and the adventures he’d say he had under the earth or in the sky or riding on an arrow: he wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t telling the truth. He’d never known a Crow who’d talk so. Except one. Likely she was paying him back for his own impossibi
lities.

  “Why,” he asked her, “are you telling me this?”

  “I was just coming to that,” she said, and her stance was teasing and shy at once. “The Kingfisher said that because I was ignorant, because I was young and foolish, she would help me to get out of the water if I promised never to come back again. I didn’t know what to say. I think the cold of the water was stopping my heart, or my breath. But the Kingfisher took ahold of me—don’t ask me how—and bore me up through the lake and out into the air and even as far as the shore, where I somehow scrabbled or scrambled up and out. And I sat in the sun and tried to get dry all that day long.

  “But you see, what I’ve always been so sorry for—I never thanked that Kingfisher for taking me out of the water. And now I can’t go back, because I promised I never would.”

  “Ah,” Dar Oakley said.

  “I can’t go back,” she said, and turned an eye on him. “Back under the water of that lake. Not I.”

  Dar Oakley considered the sleek black bird, who seemed not in the least distressed by her difficulty. He had no intention of asking her another thing about it, since her reply would be obvious. “Getting cooler,” he said instead. “Let’s you and me go find something good to eat.”

  Soon enough summer had passed, and the rain and the gray clouds came over the southern lands, reminding him of his first home beyond the daywise sea. When Dar Oakley’s relatives, migrating from the snowy north, began to appear, they were surprised to discover him there—they thought for sure he’d been caught and eaten. Now it was her turn to stay away, the strangers having a bad reputation among her flock, such as gypsies anywhere can have: as though thievery and a black eye on the main chance were qualities only of others from elsewhere.

  “So you’ve been here all along?” one of his kin asked Dar Oakley.

  “Yes.”