Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

  “Good living here?”

  “Oh, pretty good.”

  “These Crows hereabouts are tough, aren’t they?”

  “Like a lot of Crows back home,” Dar Oakley said, which got a laugh.

  “Well,” said the other, whose name Dar Oakley can’t recall. “I won’t be having much to do with them anyway.”

  “Nor they with you.”

  “But you got on well, it seems,” said the other, in something like suspicion. And Dar Oakley took a stance—I’ve seen him do it—a stance that has the same uses, I think, as a shrug.

  She didn’t see him much in that season, but sought him out in late winter when her time had begun; he made himself easy to find, in a place away from others. Because he’d spent a year in this place, because of her nearness, he was in the same state this spring as she. They faced each other as new persons, though not as strangers. I wonder if it’s like turning back into a teenager, once in every year.

  He groomed her, and she allowed him to.

  “So these tasks,” he said.

  “These tasks,” she said. “You know about them.”

  “The Kingfisher,” he said.

  Her eyes closed, in thought or pleasure or both. She named the other tasks, and the list seemed to differ from the one she’d given him before.

  “Well, I think I could do these things,” he said. “I know I could, though I’ve never tried any of them. I’ve never met a Kingfisher.”

  “No,” she said.

  “But you know,” he said. “I’m very old.”

  “Old,” she said.

  “I don’t suppose,” he said, “that you’d want to change them a little because of that, or remove one or two?”

  “No,” she said.

  He bent his head before her; she took the feathers of his head in her bill one at a time, and cleaned each one. “Well, anyway,” he said, “you might think about how long they’re going to take me. If I’m ever able to do them all. Which here I swear I will try to do.”

  She withdrew from him, turned away, and back again: that dance.

  “It might take me so long, though,” he said, “that you’d give up on me. Forget that somewhere I’m still at it.”

  “I won’t,” she said.

  They were quite close. He turned with her, becking up and down.

  “I just want you to know,” he said, his head now alongside hers, eye to her eye, “that if some quick-wing youngster should set forth and do all you ask in a single season, I’d understand—I mean I would if I ever learned of it—that you’d have to choose him. That you should.”

  “All right,” she said. She had bent low, wings outstretched, almost sweeping the earth.

  “But still I will do those things.”

  “Kingfisher,” she said. Her tail rose, spread.

  “Every one. I’ve sworn.”

  Then there was no more need for tasks, as Dar Oakley knew: poor dead Kits had taught him in the long-before, when she’d chosen him though he’d done none of the tasks she set for him. They were never meant to be done, only accepted, but accepted for real, with all your heart as Dar Oakley would learn to say. That was what no suitor of this youngling had guessed; and Dar Oakley couldn’t know if it was so for every courted female, or if it was only so for some—those like her, black her; didn’t know if she knew that the things she asked for had no value, not for her or him, they were nothing, had anyway been done already in the very naming of them, her to him, him to her: Kingfisher, moonlight flight, People’s oxcart, Fisher cat, mountain quartz. Because now they were aloft together, a blur of wings and tails, and then aground again, all accomplished.

  One thing more.

  “They’ll hate you,” she said. “My kin. They hate all of you.”

  “Fly away with me,” he said. “Billwise to my demesne.”

  “They’ll hate me there. They will.”

  “No,” Dar Oakley said. “I’m Old Crow in that land, the biggest of Biggers. No one would dare.”

  She moved beside him. “Dai,” he whispered to her, “ndai, daya, na.”

  “What’s it like there?” she asked.

  “It’s good. The best land.”

  “Are there cherries there?”

  “Cherries?”

  “I love cherries,” she said.

  “Na Cherry,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Na Cherry,” he said, and now he was close as close to her again. “Your name.”

  “We don’t like her,” a big female said. “Your mate. She’s not one of us. We hate her.”

  In the greening trees of his demesne, Dar Oakley could perceive Crows he hadn’t particularly taken notice of before, mostly males—the females were already sitting eggs. They regarded him. More were coming in.

  “She’s fine,” he said, and stepped closer to Na Cherry. “Don’t worry about her.”

  “We’re not worried,” said the female, who as far as Dar Oakley knew had not chosen or inherited a name. “We don’t like her.”

  “It’s all right,” Na Cherry said. “I’m all right.” Crows of this place had dismantled the first nest she’d begun, and the next as well. Dar Oakley’d driven them off, told her they were jokers, harmless.

  “It’s not all right,” the big female said. “She has to go. We don’t want it.”

  “You can stay,” a Bigger whom Dar Oakley knew called out. “She has to go.”

  “It’s our country,” called a voice from the trees. “It’s for us and ours.”

  Dar Oakley roused, his plumage rose, he grew in size; the Crows in the trees did the same. Several dropped to branches closer to him and to Na Cherry. Defiance, he perceived, might not be the right choice. He’d known times and places where such things as seemed about to occur here and now really had occurred: he knew what a mob of Crows could do, would do if so moved. He and she could turn and fly, but that has a certain effect on a mob—as not only Crows know.

  “Your country?” he said, not loud but definite. “I led you to this country, long ago. I was first among us then, before any of you were born. We met Crows here and made nests among them. Mated with them, male and female.” He thought that none of them remembered this, that few enough even remembered being told the tale. They wouldn’t have dared censure him this way back then. Had his kind grown more contentious, intolerant, and he’d not noticed it?

  “Tell me this,” Dar Oakley called to them all. “Tell me that you, any of you, would give up a mate.” There were calls and noise all around, objections made. “No, no,” Dar Oakley said. “Just tell me. Or what if it was you ordered to go, leave your mate and your freehold. Tell me you’d do it.”

  For a moment that seemed to still them, but Crows won’t ponder hypotheticals for long, and clamor returned. Dar Oakley could feel Na Cherry tremble beside him, her wings taut. “Wait, wait,” he said. “Stop.” He put all his old authority into the word. “Stop now. Listen.”

  One by one they shut up.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “We’ll go on. We’ll go to a place I know of, far from here. A place not in Ka at all.”

  Not in Ka? Mocking laughter, cries of Go, go! and some aggressive shifting of places, putting the big Crows closer to Dar Oakley and his mate. Not in Ka? Wherever we are is in Ka!

  “Oh yes,” Dar Oakley said. “I know a place.”

  What place, what place? He told them: a place where food is endless, always more coming to be, where Crow young keep coming forth, where there is more life-sustaining death than all of us, no, many more than all of us again and again can ever use—but only coming into being as we need it.

  Much hilarity and denouncing for this, but some old Crows, alpha females, heads of families, stayed quiet. “Where is it, this place?” said one, and some others took up that call.

  “Think I’d tell you?” Dar Oakley said. “Go find it for yourselves. If you’re lucky, we’ll see you there.”

  This was too much. Cries and demands, Tell! Tell! bu
t Dar Oakley stayed quiet. He could feel Na Cherry shrink against him. All she had for assurance was stories, stories he’d told of tight spots he’d got out of, lands he’d seen.

  “All right, all right!” he called as loudly as he could. “I’ll tell you what. We’ll stay here and you go.”

  He waited for this to shut them up. It didn’t quite. “Yes!” he said. “Let us two take a small freehold hereabouts, say over daywise, beyond those hills, where once we all flocked. Small, a small freehold there, out of the way. And I’ll tell you everything I know of this land I’ve found.”

  They were all listening now. They might still feel murderous, but he thought they wouldn’t do murder now. “All right,” he said. “This land. It’s easy to get there. Nearer than you can know. So close you can reach it by not going there at all. In fact, that’s the only way to reach it.”

  “What?” shrieked a big female, the same one who’d first sentenced Na Cherry to death or exile.

  “This land,” Dar Oakley said, “is not like other lands. It’s like no other land. Other lands you go to; this land comes to you. You get there by staying where you are.” The tension in the trees was supplanted by head-twitching waves of curiosity and doubt. “You don’t believe me? Haven’t I been the traveler? Didn’t I carry your fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers to lands of wealth? I can’t lie; you know I can’t.”

  Dar Oakley took a brief flight to a farther branch, and no one challenged him. Na Cherry hurried to stand beside him. “This land’s for you alone,” he said. “It’s coming. Watch for signs of it. We won’t be there.”

  They weren’t satisfied. If this land comes to us, why hasn’t it come before? Because you never wanted to go there, and didn’t know you could. If we don’t like this land, how can we return from it? You wouldn’t want to, ever.

  Finally, silence.

  “Well,” Dar Oakley said. “Good-bye, then.”

  He dropped from the branch, and he and Na Cherry were flying. Not fleeing, flying. They heard calls and queries and disputing behind them, but they sailed on as though everything was settled. They went and took that little freehold over the eastern hills, and built a new nest there just in time, and Na Cherry laid her first three green-and-black eggs. The freehold was at the edge of the flock’s demesne but definitely within it, within the greater company of Crows and their patrolling. It reminded Dar Oakley of that newcomer’s freehold on the marches of the demesne where he’d been born; of his sisters, of his mother and her Servitor, of the Vagrant. The memories gathered within him without his choosing; it was like being lifted effortlessly on a thermal. Watching over Na Cherry in their nest in a great resinous Pine, he wasn’t made to think of Kits or any other mate of the many he had had, but of his mother sitting her eggs and talking to him of his own days in the nest.

  In summer he watched Na Cherry with their gawky young, their breasts still barred in gray, as she took them out in the world. See there, children, what is it? It is a dead calf of the People’s over the hill. No one’s discovered it! We call, Ka! Ka! to see if others will come to the find. Call, children! Now we may wait and see, or shall we go down alone? Yes, let’s. Your father will keep watch, and wait. Now do as I do. We’ll begin, children, with the eyes.

  Na Cherry never lost the soft articulation that had made her a shunned alien once, but the others ceased to be offended and in time hardly noticed it. Some of the younger males even took a mating-time interest in her, and one or two applied to serve her—but Dar Oakley, tolerant old Crow though he’d become, would have none of that. She lived long, in Crow years; her and Dar Oakley’s children eventually numbered in the dozens, and many lived. Of all the mates that Dar Oakley’s had, Na Cherry was his the longest; when she died, he’d lived beside her for so many seasons that he had almost forgotten that it was possible for her to die—and impossible for him to die and not to live on without her.

  He doesn’t know where or how—that’s common enough. Her eyes had dimmed—she could have mistaken a thorn hedge for a sheltering brake when pursued. Or struck a tree with a wing and hidden herself to heal, and was found by a Fox, a Marten. (He looked in all the hiding places they both had committed to memory, and found neither her nor Crow feathers in any.) Taken by a Hawk, a Redtail or a Falcon; by an Owl when he and she were apart at night. Shot or snared for sport by a People child, the remains of her claimed by scavengers. All these things he pondered. The light bodies of birds are quickly consumed by death and bugs. Everyone knows.

  It was a long year. Dar Oakley remained on his and Na Cherry’s freehold till autumn days grew short; sometimes his sons and daughters came to see him, asked him for stories and wisdom, but he didn’t have much to offer them beyond gratitude for being there. He flocked as usual with the others in the great roost when the cold grew deeper; it didn’t matter if he wanted company or not, there was safety in numbers when predators grew bold.

  But he didn’t travel south with them that winter.

  He ceased eating, or almost ceased; he’d made no vow, just didn’t feel compelled to. It seemed that in Na Cherry’s death, the deaths of all those he loved were contained: the nestlings washed out of nests in rainstorms, old friends who took fool chances, mates leaving at morning and not returning at night. They seemed, dreadfully, dead but not gone at all, not one of them; not vanished, not from him even if from Ka.

  He huddled skinny and cold on a high rock, looking out over snow and white sky.

  Was it really true that after death there was nothing left of a Crow, nothing but bones and feathers? Would that be worse than to know that somewhere, somehow, Na Cherry was still alive, still herself, that all those he’d loved over long years were too, in a place to which he could never go, and out of which they could never come?

  It could be, couldn’t it, that there was such a realm as that within Ka—the Ymr of Ka, in a way—even if it was closed to Crows until death. Of course there was! Where else had he been, in all those summers and winters when he wasn’t among the living? He couldn’t remember anything of it, and for all he knew had just slept there, as oblivious of himself as any Crow with his head on his breast and his eyes closed and his feet locked in sleep around a branch. For all he knew. But what if it wasn’t that way? If he could go there dead and return, why couldn’t he go there alive and return? They were there, Na Cherry and all of them, or they would be if he could believe they were.

  He squeezed his eyes tight shut, as People did when they wanted to see what wasn’t there. How did they do it, make a country out of their desire for one? He knew he would never see Kits again in any realm. But he wanted to see those he’d lost, he wanted to see his mate again, he wanted it with all his heart. If he couldn’t have this wish, he wished himself to be dead, dead as dead, if that alone would take him to where Na Cherry was.

  In the darkness of his closed eyes he felt a presence, soft yet large, come behind him. His eyes opened and he saw the snow and the hills and the far houses from which smoke came. All unchanged. Only this presence.

  In a sudden fear he changed his stance on the rock and looked behind him. A great Snowy Owl stood near enough to smell. There was no way to escape it, and Dar Oakley couldn’t fly anyway, paralyzed. The huge yellow eyes. The white ears, big as a Sparrow’s wings. Motionless. Dar Oakley supposed the Owl was about to kill and eat him, and in that way he certainly would be borne to that land, wish answered. He lowered his head. He hoped it wouldn’t hurt.

  You, said the Owl. You have summoned me. Why?

  I summoned you?

  With all your heart.

  Dar Oakley looked up. It was hard to believe the great bird had spoken. Hard to believe, also, that he himself knew what to answer to the Owl’s question.

  My mate, he said (tilting his head up to meet its gaze), is dead. I want to go to the land where she is and see her once more.

  Yes, said the Owl. I will take you if you want to go.

  You will?

  It is my realm, the Owl said,
and I know it.

  Dar Oakley had seen Snowy Owls rarely. On the bare island of the Terns. In the land of the Small Ugly People in winter, big enough to carry one of them off. The only Owl that hunts by day: a night bird in the day.

  Listen to me now, the Owl said. If I am to take you, you must do everything exactly as I say and do just as I do, or the ways to that land will vanish forever for you.

  Why? Dar Oakley asked. Why will you do this for me?

  He looked into the Owl’s eyes, so large he could see plainly the pupils dilate and contract, and he saw his answer; or rather he saw that the Owl was his answer, and he’d get no other.

  Remember, it said (though the narrow black beak, seeming too small for the huge head, never opened). Exactly as I say, all that I do.

  Yes, said Dar Oakley, who knew that he himself had not spoken words aloud either. Yes, I will do all that you do and all that you say to do.

  We’ll fly, said the Owl, and opened its white wings, so broad that Dar Oakley for an instant could see nothing else; then it was in flight, and Dar Oakley followed.

  Had she sent this Owl to him? he wondered; had she heard his call and dispatched it? He had opened an Ymr in Ka; anything was possible.

  This is fine country, he heard the Owl say in its strangely thin small voice.

  In fact, the country they flew over, the country Dar Oakley had been looking out on when he made his wish, seemed to be losing qualities. The dark clumps of forest, the streak of pink cloud, the far-off People village and its smoking chimneys, were gone.

  Yes, indeed it is, he said. Fine country.

  We’ll fly over the river, the Owl said, and rest in that grove of trees.

  There was nothing beneath them but snow.

  Yes, we will, Dar Oakley said. Good.

  After a time the Owl pulled up, spread and beat its wings as though to take a perch, and settled on the ground. Dar Oakley did the same, flying down and then stalling, to settle as on a branch beside the Owl.

  See down there? the Owl said. A Mouse.

  Dar Oakley studied the surrounding empty waste. Yes, he said. A Mouse.

  The Owl lifted its wings slightly—and then closed them, strode across the snow a few steps, and leapt on something that wasn’t there. Lifted a huge foot to its mouth and ate nothing. It turned its head far to one side and then far around to the other side—that motion of Owls that makes some Crows believe that they can turn their heads all the way around. Then it took another brief run and leapt on prey again, lifted an invisible something to its mouth, and returned to Dar Oakley. With one foot it took nothing from its mouth and held it out to him. Eat, it said.