Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

  I did that, Coyote said; I saw to it. Myself and not another.

  And the People hated me for it.

  And they came to kill me.

  But that Speaker to animals—a smart one!—said he could think of a better way to punish me, and he knew how to do it. He said: let him live long, let him not die ever, let him scrabble for every bite, let him be always hungry as the living are hungry, let him never rest, never join the spirits who don’t hunger or thirst or hurt. And let him still fear death just as he does now, fear death forever, and look back constantly to see if Death is following.

  Dar Oakley asked, How did they do that? How did they make it so? Was it a stone they gave you, or was it something that was nothing, or—

  Too long ago to remember, Coyote said. It worked, though, you see? I’ve been traveling ever since, always looking for a den, my own. Even if People didn’t know my story, they always seemed to know there was a good reason to run me off, shoot me, poison me. Or I’d get in trouble all by my smart self, get caught, get killed again, learn again, forget again. So, for sure, looking backward all the time. Cautious is what I’d say: see what’s gaining on me.

  And always moving, Dar Oakley said.

  Mostly, Coyote said. Toward morning.

  Daywise.

  You go a little farther every year, you maybe find things a little easier where nobody knows you, you do a little better—for a while. But here’s the funny part, Crow: ever since back then when Death started, all People die, and no matter how much their dead selves want to come back and be alive again, they never can. All because of me. And my punishment for that? To be more afraid of Death even than they are, and yet never die.

  Yes, Dar Oakley said.

  That was the last time I got involved with helping them, the Coyote said. That’s for sure.

  The world had begun to brighten at last now. Perhaps a night had passed, a day had come. The People began to come from the buildings, carrying their plastic tubs and pulling their children, their silent shadow forms growing more solid. It appeared the Crow and the Coyote had reached a high embankment from which the city over the river could be seen in its endlessness: its streets scribed over the earth, the heights in its center, the ruination for a moment unperceived. Dawn-glow through the smoke of its exhalations, scatter of city lights being put out as day grew bright. Cars on the bridges, which hadn’t been there before.

  A couple of poor beasts born to die, Dar Oakley thought. Who got into tangles they never expected. Trying to help People, or save themselves. He realized—it struck him for the first time now as a possibility—that there might be many like the Coyote and the Crow, all around Kits’s wide round world. Maybe one of every sort of beast and bird—one each, caught in People stories and People hopes, foolishly wise, journeying in realms not theirs, seeking or stumbling upon or finding and losing the Most Precious Thing: stealing it for themselves, hiding it and losing it, forgetting where it was. The thing that kills the thing that kills us all: Death. Coyote’s gift, the thing People have hated and feared the most and yet can never do without.

  Dar Oakley began to laugh. He laughed, his laughter a Crow’s, which sounds so jeering and unkind and harsh to all the world but Crows.

  Well, they should be glad, then, he said, that we did it, shouldn’t they? That we stole Death’s death from them, I mean, so that they could never have it, no matter how hard they tried, no matter how much they wanted it. That was good for them, wasn’t it? Aren’t they lucky?

  You’re asking me? the Coyote said. He crawled out from his hidey-hole, lifted a hind leg to pass a few drops of water. Overhead Crows were calling Crows to feast, heading in numbers for the mountain at the end of Ymr.

  Well, I think they are, Dar Oakley said. And what have we ever got for it?

  Stories, Coyote said. Not to tell you something you don’t already know. We’re made of stories now, brother. It’s why we never die even if we do.

  It was day, real day, and he was at risk: time to go to earth, to his wife and young. He put his black nose to the ground, learning what he could learn, and found a direction he liked. As he went away he turned his harsh head back, Coyote-style, to Dar Oakley.

  See you never, death-bird, he said. And he made a soft snickering that Dar Oakley, for that one moment, knew could remake the world if Coyote had not renounced the power to do it.

  That was the last story, the story Dar Oakley told me on this the last day of my own life on earth.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Barbara has come in the truck. She has put on various bracelets and necklaces of stones and leather that I’ve never seen her wear before. I won’t ask her about them; their use or meaning is perhaps evident. The child’s cheeks and forehead are painted in stripes of black and yellow. I wonder if these are her own invention, or really come from a tradition she still retains; she’s certainly never shown any such knowledge before. She’s hung a little crucifix around his neck as well.

  This is the day: we’ve agreed. There’s no particular reason that it be this day, but this is the day.

  She climbed down from the truck and stood resolute in the dirt of the drive, feet wide apart in new sneakers. “It’s a good day to die,” she said. A line from the movies, I suppose. Since then she’s been as still as a stone. The child is silent too, held within the frayed carrier that straps around Barbara’s middle, like a womb, as though he’s still waiting to be born. Maybe it’s Barbara’s activity at other times, banging around the kitchen and muttering, that makes him give those spectral wails.

  I’m a little fearful, a little excited, like a boy off to his first day at a new school. Itur in antiquam silvam, stabula alta ferarum. The journey into the old woods, the deep dens of the beasts; the door into no-place. Where Æneas went following Odysseus, and Dante following Virgil. And now me following a Crow. They had no trouble finding the gate, and nor will I.

  I’ve almost reached the end of this last pad of paper. Only a few leaves will be left unfilled. As the generation of leaves, so is that of men. I’ll now take a pill to keep my heart from racing distractingly, and another to keep my muscles working. It’s a fair climb up. This pad and the other filled-up ones I’ll leave here on the table, though I have no expectation that anyone will look at them, or take an interest in what they say. My continuation is elsewhere; and if it isn’t, I won’t care if anything of me persists here in this world, from which I’m already gone. I have sometimes thought of or felt the presence of a reader for what I’ve written: I suppose it’s impossible to write at length without feeling such a presence. When that reader momentarily has a face, the one I sense is Debra’s.

  He’s here waiting, Dar Oakley: I saw the movement of a black branch of the flowering Cherry, and there he was, calling the call Ka. Death-bird. This pen is dry.

  Well, Reader—you whose existence I only half believe in, and whom I mostly know to be me alone—I guess you’ll be able to tell by these further pages filled with writing that the journey must not have eventuated as envisioned. It didn’t. I’m uncertain, though, whether I can tell what things did happen—if any things at all happened. I may not be certain of anything ever again.

  Certainly we set out in the truck, Barbara driving and me holding the child in the ragged denim straitjacket, not wrapped and belted around me but gathered in my arms. He seemed to weigh nothing at all, but he struggled to act, his head arching back and his tense hands grabbing air. Dar Oakley beat alongside, crossing over us now and then, skimming once so close to the open window that Barbara ducked instinctively; sometimes we lost sight of him and stopped, only to hear and see him on ahead. It seemed a long trip—longer than I remembered or imagined—and yet when the park entrance appeared it surprised me, and for a moment my heart rebelled.

  “Here,” I said.

  “Yeh,” Barbara said, and turned the wheel that way.

  Pretty quickly it became apparent that the truck couldn’t get far past the entrance. It was hardly spring, but the heat had brou
ght forth masses of creeper and kudzu-like green stuff I couldn’t name, each kind entangling with the others and trying to gain the high trees, like madmen trying to climb up each other to get out of a pit. The trees already bore thick cloaks of that vine I used to see only on the trees along highways, enriched with carbon dioxide from cars. Where these got their strength I didn’t know; it looked like another planet.

  There aren’t many now who leave from the same world they were born into. Not here, not anywhere on earth as far as I can tell or know; the simplest and most unchanging of human societies have been so shattered in the last hundred years, people flung into centrifuges of change and loss, that there comes to be nothing at last to say good-bye to. I was leaving the world, but it was not my world I was leaving.

  Barbara got out, carefully removing the truck keys and pocketing them. I held the child, clad in only a droopy diaper, while she tied on the carrier. She settled him in the pouch and nodded. It occurred to me I had never heard her speak a word to him. From farther on along what seemed the path I heard a Crow.

  It was a longer climb than the last time I’d made it, with Debra. I thought Debra would be present to me as we went up, but she seemed to want no part of this expedition; she had a horror of suicide that I didn’t share but learned never to speak about. We stopped now and then to rest, and Dar Oakley would return to us and sit a branch and regard us. I’ve always been reluctant to speak to him in Barbara’s presence—I haven’t wanted her to think I’m nuts. It didn’t matter now.

  “Do you know these ways?” I asked.

  “No,” he said. “I know these birds calling. That’s all.”

  “All right,” I said. And then: “Is day night there?”

  Dar Oakley shrugged his Crow shrug: this wasn’t his journey. “Well,” he said, “I think it has been. Who knows? It’s not ever the same.”

  My old fear of a place of darkness, what I could sometimes think of as my mother’s curse. I thought that whatever else awaited me I wouldn’t be alone: but of course there was no promise even of that. Anyway when we got to the ridge I was leading us to, afternoon was passing. A cold wind off the lake was angering the trees and chilling the heated air.

  “It’s only a few steps that way,” I said to Barbara. “Let’s sit and wait a while.”

  “Wait?”

  “We’ll wait till dark, or near it. So it will be day. Night here will be day there: he told me that,” I said, and looked up. Dar Oakley looked down, mum.

  Anyway we waited there for sunset, the three of us wrapped in a blanket against our different chills, and Dar Oakley high on an extended branch of a tree I can’t name. I held Barbara’s fat, warm hand in mine, or maybe it was she who held my hand: both of us conscious that we might lose our nerve, that our resolve might weaken. When the sun was low behind the trees, we stood and went up to the high ledge. I had to be careful of my footing. Barbara, too, sensation in her feet damaged by her diabetes, walking with arms apart as though feeling her way in the dark. But we made it to our place, a wide shelf bald and flat, projecting out over the cliff. Barbara took my hand again. She was weeping softly but not in distress; the little painted head poking out from the carrier made an answering soft moan. I knew we mustn’t linger.

  “Itur in antiquam silvam,” I said.

  “Amen,” Barbara said.

  Dar Oakley with a great cry—defiance? dismay? summons?—rose from his branch and dropped downward through the darkening air, as noble and plain as any being could be. With our own cries—I can hear them still—we too stepped into air.

  Immediately it seemed we weren’t falling but climbing down the sheer wall: as though our descending bodies had left our spirits behind to follow after as best they could. It was a long way down; we clung to scragged branches, felt with our feet for the next step.

  I didn’t think it would be like this, Barbara said.

  We came upon a path that led down between riven blocks of stone, becoming less steep, gradual enough so that at least we could turn and face the way we went. On ahead I could see the Crow watching for us, taking this branch, then that, shaking his wings and tail once, twice, three times, as he always does.

  We came out at the end of the narrow passage onto the stony shore of the lake. It was now neither day nor night. The shingle rattled as the low waves came in and drew the stones out, then again pushed them in. It seemed impossible that this shore could be all there was.

  Are we there? I called to Dar Oakley.

  We are where we are, I heard him call.

  Is there more?

  Much more, he said. I don’t know how much.

  I thought to say that we couldn’t walk very far, the three of us on the ground, but that made no sense, and anyway it didn’t seem hard: it was more like imagining a long walk than taking one. We took the leftward way. As we went on, the shore widened; the sullen lake withdrew, as though wanting nothing to do with us. Dar Oakley once told me how even for him the things on this side, the trees and stones and ground and air, seem filled with conscious intentions, likes and dislikes, no matter that they never are like that for Crows in Ka. But it’s so for People wherever they are, he thinks; and in Ymr what People think is so is so.

  We were somehow no longer walking the shore, but had entered a different space, a wood: I thought a Beech-wood, though the light was hardly sufficient to tell. As in all Beech forests, the understory was sparse, the ground bare except for Beech leaves. Silent.

  Dar Oakley flew past overhead, black against the gray trees, and seeing him made me feel certain that we were growing closer to where we were destined to go. Then he pulled up, sank, and settled on the forest floor amid the leaves, waiting.

  There’s no one, I said to him when I reached the place where he stood, stirring the leaves up in hope of nuts, perhaps. We haven’t seen anyone else. Where are they all?

  He looked up and around as though he himself had not noticed that. What I had most feared: a blank place without light or movement, an eternity alone with my two unchanging fellows.

  We’re not there yet, he said. It’s all farther in.

  He didn’t seem as certain of this as he had before. He rose from the leaves, which flew away rustling from his wing beats, and took a low branch. He doesn’t much like looking upward at me: it’s an old instinct.

  Let’s go on, he said.

  I can’t say how long we wandered in search of where we were supposed to go or be, but I have one reason, now, to believe it was long and not short. Barbara, aware of (or merely remembering) how hard it was for her to walk, asked us often to stop so she could rest, and we did, but it didn’t seem that she was truly tired, and nor was I. Now and then from behind me I heard her whispering to the child, pausing as though to hear his answers. Times when we walked side by side I told her about Dar Oakley, stories I’d never dared tell her before: like Debra she dislikes Crows, she’d made that clear, and to tell her stories of him—stories I’d claim were his—would have seemed like cruel teasing, or mild madness.

  Here, though, she listened; sometimes she laughed, a sound that seemed to displease the place and the trees.

  I told her of Dar Oakley’s search for Nothing in the lands of her ancestors (if he had really been there, and they were hers). I told her how he’d crossed the sea with the Terns and she nodded, though she said she had never seen the sea except on TV. I told her how Dar Oakley had tried to bring back his dead mate from the Crow land of death, and she said she thought she’d heard a story like that before, but about a different creature. And all the time Dar Oakley went above and before us, or settled on the fruitless ground to peck, or walked with his Crow head bobbing with each step and pointing his eyes this way and that. Whether he heard or understood I don’t know. I think he had already begun to depart from us. Which seemed right, for he alone (so I thought) was still among the living.

  However long it was, we came at length to a final place, for there is one; or there was one for us.

  The forest itse
lf hadn’t changed, had changed so little that we might well have been walking all along in great circles, and Dar Oakley couldn’t point us daywise or darkwise here. It had grown more . . . remote, though, and at the same time more familiar, as though we wandered at once from and toward a place we remembered. I don’t know how to say it better. The trees were fewer, stood farther apart, aged and failing. The grass was close-cropped, the tiny saplings nipped off in a way I recognized. Then for a moment a wind of some kind blew through the big trees and lifted their branches—in this place it was as though they gestured softly in many ways with a million palsied hands, and made the wind themselves by their waving.

  Deer, Barbara said.

  And there were Deer: many Deer, or one Deer repeated many times. They stood at varying distances from us. They weren’t different from the Deer in my backyard and in the field beyond, raising their heads one by one to regard us; great eyes at once mild and alert, musing whether to flee.

  The ones we killed, Barbara said. She crossed herself. We shouldn’t of, she said.

  I didn’t know whether she meant she and I—I haven’t killed a Deer ever—or we People, or her own kind back through centuries and centuries. The Deer didn’t seem reproachful to me. They looked on us with some intent or expectation, though. And—how was it? We’d turned no new way or taken a new path—there it was before us, the place or point we’d sought, not far off.

  It was a door.

  Not a space or opening on a path, or the entrance to a farther country; not a gateway, a door. As we came closer to it, it grew larger: a huge, obdurate double door, a portal of the made world, somehow Egyptian in its monumental plainness; tall and rooted in stonework at the base. There was no wall that it made a passage through; it stood all alone, the silent woods all around.

  What door is it? Barbara asked.

  Yours, I guess, Dar Oakley said.

  It was ours. It was the way in, which we had brought forth by our coming to it. It was the door that Anna Kuhn went through as Dar Oakley watched, though this one was not hers. It was the deep well that the Singer and later the Brother had gone down into, the barrow that Fox Cap had sat on to tell her story. But though it was ours—though it was for us—I knew even before I went to it that I couldn’t open it. I went up the shallow steps, which strangely seemed worn away by the passage of feet over a great length of time. There was no handle, knob, or keyhole; the door could only be pushed open or shut. I put my hand on the door on the right side and pressed, and then on the left side, and I couldn’t feel the pressure of my hand on it. I turned away.