Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

  But he’d have to do more. The time would soon come when she was no longer able to be wooed, when for all his gifts and charms he could no longer win her and carry her off: not in the mood. He’d have to get into the house, and soon.

  How Crows can do things that astonish People—appear where they shouldn’t be, come into possession of things they can’t have got—isn’t really different from how Rats or Raccoons or even Cats do similar things: by persistence, constant investigation, endless trial and error. When People find that an animal has done something apparently impossible, they are seeing just the end of a long, secret process. Dar Oakley had come to know that house in ways even its inhabitants didn’t, every loose board and minute hole and fallen brick, every door that was opened to admit this person or that and when and how often, and they never caught him at it. He gave up on each possibility that he couldn’t use and then returned to it again and then again just to be certain, while keeping all the others in memory. So when at dawn one of the females went out of the kitchen with a pail in each hand for the Pigs, Dar Oakley knew she would leave the door open behind her; he was there and could slip in behind her back.

  He was inside. He knew houses: how the ways within them twist and turn, how the ceiling hangs over the head oppressively. And he knew just where Moss’s daughter was: past this darkwise place, through this door ajar.

  She was delighted to see him; she wasn’t a Crow who knew what was likely and what was unlikely for Crows to do. “What did you bring?” she asked.

  “I brought myself,” Dar Oakley said. “All yours.” And he becked deeply. And Moss’s daughter, aflood with what it is that makes these things unrefusable, returned that beck as well as she could from the perch, and Dar Oakley becked again, and she again, and cooed a certain familiar coo. She may not have known what she did, but she knew how to do it.

  The perch she sat on in this room was wider than the one outdoors. It was a ring perch, meant (I’d suppose) for a parrot now gone. With a quick hop Dar Oakley was beside her on it. The sky beyond the window was brightening dangerously. Dar Oakley studied the thing wrapped around her darkwise ankle with first one eye and then the other. He paused to respond to her sounds, to nuzzle and groom her, and then he bent again to the leather strap and the thongs that held it tight. Studied it with his bill, tugging and poking. Meanwhile Moss’s daughter began grooming the feathers of his head, and he paused to make sounds of appreciation. She spoke, and he grasped her bill in his, and shook it in play. The course eternal, except that at the same time he was busy undoing the strap that held her. No, it was too hard. He hung upside down from the ring and tried the thongs instead where they wrapped around the perch. Better. He drew one through the knot like a Robin pulling up a worm.

  Footsteps suddenly loud in the house.

  “Not One,” Moss’s daughter said.

  Dar Oakley pulled out the other thong as quick as he could and dropped from the ring into a mass of plants and furnishings in a corner just as the female who’d taken slops to the Pigs came in. She stood for a moment in the dim room, listening, turning her head slowly as People do to see the thing they think they heard. Then—maybe a bit of sun struck the window ledge—she could see something that surprised or puzzled her; she went to the window, lifted the sash, and looked down at Dar Oakley’s love offerings. Mine, said Moss’s daughter softly. The woman shot a glance at her—Dar Oakley concealed behind the aspidistra thought she’d understood the Crow’s word, but of course she hadn’t. She turned again to the things on the ledge, leaned out to touch one of them, another one, with a sort of distaste or revulsion. Then she swept them all up, thrust them into the pocket of her apron, and bustled purposefully from the room without shutting the window.

  Now, Dar Oakley whispered. Now, fly with me.

  I’ll be caught and fall.

  No. You won’t fall. I won’t let you fall.

  One will come, One will put me back.

  No. We’ll fly, out the window, there, out into the air.

  I can’t. I won’t.

  More footsteps now in the house, different ones, falling harder, louder, faster. Dar Oakley swept up behind Moss’s daughter, wings beating, driving her from the perch. With a cry she fell, but her wings supported her; she rose. A sudden flurry of Crow in the air of the papered and carpeted parlor, at once love and struggle, and he turned her the way she had to go. In something like a Crow version of holding hands they flew, almost touching wingtips, to the window, and there he had to lead her out—she was trying to turn back, saying, One, One—but then it was done, they were flying daywise into the bright air and the morning. Behind them they heard a cry, an animal bellow, a cry of rage. Dar Oakley didn’t turn to look back, and Moss’s daughter, crying too, followed him. And Dar Oakley had a sudden thought: I found a way into the house of a great black Crow and stole the Most Precious Thing therein, and I will be pursued. He seemed to have lived so long that he had come to the end of things possible to happen, and from now on what would happen was only what already had.

  Hello, hello, cried Moss’s daughter, joyfully; hello, hello, flying high and free with her mate toward the last of the once-great Beech-wood.

  This I hadn’t expected a Crow, or Dar Oakley, to be capable of: bending a natural urge to other uses, fooling innocence. Machiavellian. Had he learned too well from People? Had his urge for revenge purged him of decencies that even a Crow might be expected to feel? I had to wonder. Did he think, as he and she courted and nested, of Digs Moss for Snails, whose Servitor he had been, the beloved mother of this Crow that he had ruthlessly made his, and did the thought cause him regret, or shame for what he’d embarked on?

  Well, no, I guess not. It seems that—though they mate for life and defend and support their mates fiercely—Crows aren’t all that faithful in practice; there are Crow philanderers, Crow hussies, and what we label incest is meaningless to Crows (and so is innocence). Of course Moss’s daughter wasn’t actually Dar Oakley’s; and though Dar Oakley had seduced her with a purpose other than love, as far as I can tell from asking him, he hadn’t just pretended to feel something in Dr. Hergesheimer’s parlor that he didn’t really feel: I think he and all Crows are incapable of that. Anyway Dar Oakley was mated with the daughter of Digs Moss for Snails in every Crow way; pretty soon they started building a nest together. Their first attempt at a family failed, but that’s not unusual for a new bride only a year old. They wouldn’t remain mates for long, but that wasn’t because of anything within the ethos of Ka, or within Dar Oakley’s false heart, either.

  At the end of the summer molt, when Crows are spry and happy again, when the job of mating and raising young has gone by successfully or otherwise, when the winter roost is assembling and Crows are choosing to go in this direction or that, to this gathering or that one, then Crow hunting has its high season.

  Dr. Hergesheimer had been little seen by any Crow that summer. Whether he’d hunted somewhere else or hadn’t hunted at all—only one Crow wondered about that; but Dar Oakley had flown far and had no news of him. That was odd, but by the time he appeared again in the demesnes of Dar Oakley’s flock, Dar Oakley had been able to prepare, and—more importantly—to see that as many Crows as he could inculcate, induct, persuade, and win over were also prepared.

  When he came, Dr. Hergesheimer came alone, which was strange. He drove in the move-by-itself wagon, which slowly bumped and coughed its way over the stubble and the furrows and then through the tall grasses up to the edge of the Beech grove, the roost of Dar Oakley’s great flock. In the open bed in the back were no guns and none of the usual equipment; it was empty except for one long tool and two smallish red boxes. For a long time after he had stilled the truck he only sat in it, a black lump, hands on his knees. The Crows were largely gone at that hour, out in all directions foraging in the drought. The Beech leaves were already turning. Dar Oakley, out of sight, grew restless watching the Doctor do nothing at all; he had to struggle with an impulse to fly out above him, show his
face.

  Not yet.

  Dr. Hergesheimer at last got out of the truck and went to the rear to remove the tool and the two red boxes. Carrying them, he walked out across a dry streambed to where the trees grew most densely. He put down the boxes, and with the tool he bored a hole in the earth—that was what this tool was for, one of the countless tools that People used, each for a different purpose. When he had pulled up the augur and knocked the dirt from it, he knelt to open the boxes, and from them he took a number of red cylinders and carefully slipped them one by one into the hole, tamping each one down with a willow stick he picked up. The last red cylinder he messed with awhile for reasons Dar Oakley couldn’t perceive, and then put it, too, into the hole, and from it he uncoiled a long thick thread or thin rope, black and stiff, which he laid out across the ground, clearing space in the grass and earth for it to lie flat and straight. That was tempting; Dar Oakley wondered if he ought to drop down and tug at it, pull it away, but thought not. Let him see more of what the Doctor was up to.

  When all that was done, Dr. Hergesheimer walked back to his wagon and sat on its footstep. He took a flat bottle from one pocket and bread from another and ate and drank. The shadows of the trees lengthened over the grass.

  Dar Oakley had never understood why Dr. Hergesheimer had for so long hated him. Actually, he never tried very hard to understand it; he knew the boy and the man hated Crows. But it was Moss’s daughter who had revealed to him that it was he alone, Dar Oakley, that the Doctor sought. How could she have learned such a thing, not being a particularly smart Crow? It took her a while to make clear to him how Dr. Hergesheimer would point to his cheek when he talked to other hunters or with farmers whose fields he crossed with his guns. White cheek, the gesture meant, she was sure of it. With her in the field where she called Crows to their deaths, he’d point at his own face—white cheek—and then to the sky and the trees where Crows were and where the Crow he wanted might be.

  However that was, Dar Oakley was certain that no matter how much the Doctor had hated him before, he hated him more now, when the little Crow he’d caught and raised had been stolen from him. Perhaps that was why he sat there unmoving: he was waiting for the Crow he loved to return to him.

  It was now the time the Crows began to return to the trees. Dr. Hergesheimer roused, stood, and lifted the Crow-call from where it hung on his breast, wetted the stopper, and called. The call wasn’t Distress, it wasn’t Rally, it was a simple Here I am, where are you? Dr. Hergesheimer blew with his hands cupped at the end of the call, moving them expertly to control the air flow. It always amazed Dar Oakley that the sound made by a Crow-call—even when blown by an expert, even the sound made by the Doctor’s magical call—was actually not the sound made by any living Crow, and yet it could reach deeply and instantly into Crow hearts. Into his, Dar Oakley’s, too. Crows were already answering, Crows who were making for the Beech grove, calling, I’m coming, I’m near; their responses earned other calls from other Crows. From far off they could see that the hunter was no threat to them, had no gun.

  The roost was filling.

  Dr. Hergesheimer had let his Crow-call fall and lit a cigar when both he and Dar Oakley saw Moss’s daughter come in. She cried to see him—perhaps she knew him by the smoke, but she certainly knew him. Hello, hello, still the fledgling’s seeking cry. She left the crowd she’d come in with and fell, crying all the while, to where the Doctor sat. He laid the cigar on the stepping-place of his wagon, and lifted up his hand to her—you could see the grin within his black beard. Dar Oakley called to her, Come away, come, danger, danger, but Crow calls don’t carry names—they’re a different order of speech—and Dar Oakley also didn’t want to alarm the gathering Crows so that they scattered. Because this was their moment, confused and unsettling as it had become.

  He descended from his perch and beat down toward where the Doctor stood. Shrieking defiance, he turned his white cheek to him. It’s me, here I am, he cried in challenge, in fury: all the fury of his father finding the Vagrant with Mother, the fury of Va Thornhill’s Crows in the rout of the Wolves gang. He hadn’t actually been able to imagine very exactly what would happen after this challenge, since he’d formerly expected a gun, a pursuit, and now that was out. He settled on the ground, staring down his enemy first with the darkwise, then the daywise eye, challenging him to come on.

  There was no way to understand what the Doctor did then: he laughed a big, warm laugh. He cast off Moss’s daughter and took strides toward Dar Oakley as though to converse with him. He even waved his hand. Like a shy female with an aggressive suitor, Dar Oakley lifted off and then settled again not far off, closer to the trees. Dr. Hergesheimer followed. Did he mean to capture Dar Oakley with his bare hands? The Crows in the trees were calling, querying, warning, changing places, the Biggers closer, others scolding from farther off.

  Well, this’ll do, Dar Oakley thought, this’ll do. Dr. Hergesheimer came closer, talking in words Dar Oakley didn’t understand but pressing him farther into the grove, sometimes shooing him like a farmwife shooing chickens when he seemed to want to go elsewhere. But elsewhere wasn’t where Dar Oakley wanted to go. What must happen was happening, though for no reason Dar Oakley knew: Dr. Hergesheimer was within the home place of a multitude of Crows.

  At the same time he first smelled the smoke.

  While Dar Oakley and Dr. Hergesheimer were doing their strange dance or seduction, Moss’s daughter had picked up the Doctor’s abandoned but still burning cigar in her bill and carried it to the grove of trees, and there taken it to earth near where the Doctor’s black thread ran out, to play with it, have her way with it. The grass there, dry with drought, caught quickly. Almost the last thing on earth Dr. Hergesheimer saw was the smoke rising from the grass, spreading, his beloved Judas Crow hovering in delight over it, the dull fire advancing. He ran that way with a cry of horror, then saw it was too late and turned to run the other way. But now Dar Oakley gave a cry, one cry, all his force and power put into it, a cry no Crow could refuse to answer, and the Crows, led by the Biggers Ke Rainshower, Long Bill, Fa Hawthorn, and a dozen others all calling with all their might, descended on him with more following, Dar Oakley, too, crying, Strike! Strike! Eyes! Eyes! Let One have it! Don’t stop! The Doctor stalled, astonished; he flailed at the attacking birds, who executed their drill flawlessly, close-packed yet never touching, a corps de ballet swirling around their principal. His hat was lost. The noise was terrific. It was no mob; Dar Oakley had taught them well, there was no dodging in and away as at a sleepy Owl. Do harm, do harm! Get One! They got One: they stabbed Dr. Hergesheimer’s ears, they got his eyes, or at least blinded them, though he covered them with his bleeding hands. Maddened with fear he stumbled, roaring and batting at attackers he could no longer see. He had to get away from them, just get away, and for a moment he did break away from them and ran.

  But, blinded and disoriented, he ran the wrong way: within the grove, not out.

  Dar Oakley had seen the sparkle of strange fire in the grass, creeping steadily as though with a will of its own along the line of string that Dr. Hergesheimer had laid down. He had a moment in the uproar to puzzle over it, snapping and popping like outsize matches going off one after the other. Moss’s daughter was following it along, fascinated, oblivious to everything else, the screaming Crows, the bellowing Doctor. She’d drop close to it, land by it, follow it, ascend again. It was fire in perfection.

  The Doctor had given up trying to reach that sparkle; he was lost among the trees, bumping into them, shying from the sound of beating wings, reaching out to fend off Crows, who had mostly ceased to torment him and only sat above him and cursed. The choking smoke of the grass fire had turned that way in the wind; the Doctor stumbled over a root and fell facedown, struggled to rise, guarding his bloody head. Dar Oakley almost felt pity for him, a pity that was altogether unlike Pity, and delicious to feel.

  The fuse reached the charges in the hole.

  The explosion must have bee
n heard for a mile, but Dar Oakley didn’t hear it, or see it, or feel the blast of it; only for an endless moment—this anyway is what he says—he was up in the open air with Dr. Hergesheimer beside him, the two of them immobile and alone in silence, their two souls bound for different states. Then nothing.

  So Dar Oakley got his revenge. His opponent was destroyed, which was what he’d wanted and sought, and which—he had been sure—would be good for Crows. But many Crows had also been blown apart, their fragments mixed with the Doctor’s, perhaps: the daughter of Digs Moss for Snails, certainly, and some number of Dar Oakley’s friends and relations, he couldn’t know which because he was dead, as dead as they were, whichever they were. This had not been foreseen in Dar Oakley’s plan, or what counted for Dar Oakley as a plan. As in many of the great tales of vengeance achieved, Dar Oakley’s vengeance destroyed the avenger as well.

  The dynamite that Dr. Hergesheimer had planted under the Beeches by the dry streambed was also revenge, and his too turned back on him. Certainly he killed instantly the Crow he had so long hated, along with a number of other Crows and himself. There were farmers in that long war who used dynamite and claimed a hundred, a thousand dead Crows from a few standard sticks of Dupont Red Cross planted in the right places. Even Crows who’d got used to evading every other mode of attack, every other device for Crow reduction, couldn’t defeat that one. The only problem for the farmers was that when the dynamite had done its work, and the shattered tree limbs and the dead Crows were piled and burned, in the next season there would still be Crows, and in the next season more, until there were just as many as before. My Farmers’ Cyclopedia tells of one farmer who, after setting off dynamite that killed twenty Crows out of a big black flock, was asked if that had discouraged them. Well, he answered, them ones it did.