“They aren’t dead?”
“They live. Not lives like our lives. You’ll see.”
He rode on a ways in silence, gripping her rolling shoulder, thinking that she really did mean to go where she had said she would: as though it were not hard but easy. “They are the ones who stole your cap long ago,” he said.
“Not those ones. Those you could put your hand right through; if they came forth at night, they melted away at cockcrow. These are living.”
“What do they live on?”
“Fear and homage.”
Darkness came down, and thus a new day began—because the days of Fox Cap’s People, unlike ours or Crows’, began at sunset. They had set out on the first day of winter, the day the year turned to the dark side. Now the moon had grown, and would go on growing till the night when it was round, and the dark half of the month began. In the blanket looped over her right arm were meat and bread; on the staff she carried, the days till full moon were marked with cuts, and could be counted off. She didn’t know how far in the North was the place they went to, and she wanted to keep on walking on this bright night. Dar Oakley wouldn’t.
“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t fly at night.”
“You can ride,” she said. “And there’s light.”
“It’s not the right kind.”
She laughed, but she soon stopped for his sake, without saying so. He slept, head on his breast, feet locked around a branch. When his eyes opened, he could make her out in the pale placeless light, folded up on a broad rock in the open, awake, fearless. Because of him? He couldn’t think so.
On the last day of the waxing moon they came to the North. She said that was where they were, though he didn’t know how she knew. To him North wasn’t a place but a way you went. They were at the edge of a leafless forest, above a plain. It was shadowless noon. Far off, almost farther than Dar Oakley could see, there was a strange white glitter of light: it was the sea.
A long, high mound crossed the plain, seeming to have been laid down on the earth rather than grown up out of it. In fact it looked—Fox Cap said—like a great sleeping body, stretched out on its side, head on its arm. Dar Oakley couldn’t feature that. They could see dwellings strung out along its base, brown tops and whitened walls. And sheep, browsing where Fox Cap said she saw the body’s grassy knees drawn up; a dog barked, clear in the noontide.
“It’s a barrow,” she said, “where great fighters lie down deep. Think how long they’ve been within it.” She pulled her wind-tugged mantle around her. “It’s so worn away. It could be anywhere.”
Dar Oakley thought it probably was anywhere, but he felt also that he wanted to go no farther toward it. She told him to stay while she went down to those dwellings and asked for a guide to take her up where she had to go. They would know, she told him; many had come here, she said, as they two had.
She set off. Dar Oakley watched her go, then went to find something to eat. By day’s end he had swallowed several fat green caterpillars extracted with care from a prickly bush; the remains of a Red Squirrel left perhaps by a Hawk but containing still a few bits of worth; something he didn’t recognize but that on inspection turned out to be tasty; undigested meat he dug from the scat of a Wolf, or more than one, dropped days ago along a Wolf-way. From time to time he went out toward the hill to see if Fox Cap had appeared, and late in the day there she was, following an old man and a boy upward along a track Dar Oakley hadn’t perceived. He flew high over their heads, and Fox Cap pointed upward to him, and the other two paused to look up; then they went on.
Where they led her to was a depression in the center of a rise toward the daywise end of the barrow. Stones had been set around the edge of this depression. They left her with a small basket of food and went away quickly.
Dar Oakley settled beside her there. Darkwise the sun was red behind breaking clouds. Billwise, a gray shower of rain went off toward the sea: the night would be clear.
“This night,” she said. “We’ll go.”
“How?” he said, looking around at the bareness. “Where?”
“Down,” she said. “By way of a story.” She laid her staff down beside her, and drew her mantle around her. The clearing wind over the barrow was sharp, even in the hollow where they sheltered. “It will take all night to tell it,” she said. “You have to listen to it all, every word, all the way to the end. Otherwise it will do us no good at all.”
Dar Oakley said nothing. Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.
“If you listen all the way through, and don’t interrupt with silly questions or fall asleep, it’ll do.”
She waited, watching him.
“No questions,” Dar Oakley said. “All right.”
She waited.
“No sleeping,” he said, doubtful but brave—at least he hoped she thought so.
She turned toward the daywise sky, already dark, yet with a bar of glow above the farther hills. Dar Oakley realized in a sudden panic that he had just agreed to spend the night on the ground, a thing he hadn’t done since he was a lost nestling hiding under a bush.
She began to speak. Sometimes her voice rose as though she called softly to someone not present but nearby: that was singing. Sometimes she laughed and struck her knee, and because she laughed, Dar Oakley laughed too. Only after she had been telling the story for a long time did he realize that all the things told of in it had happened long ago, so long he couldn’t compute it in seasons, or in Crow lives. There was a king, she would say. There was a fool. There was a castle. What is a castle? What is a fool? He couldn’t ask. The moon—it was the glow they saw daywise—began to rise, cold-hot and orange. The story went on: fathers and lost daughters, sons who without knowing it mated with sisters or with beings that weren’t People, unwise promises made and kept or broken, swords and cups and crowns and things he couldn’t picture. He felt his eye-haws draw over, and his eyelids fall. He flitted to wake himself. And then, Fox Cap would say. And then. All that time the moon went on rising, first full moon of the winter. It seemed to grow closer as it rose, as though to hear the tale too.
Dar Oakley began to feel that the depression of earth ringed with stones where they sat had grown deeper. But he couldn’t trust his eyes in this light. Fox Cap before him was all gray and featureless except for the glitter of water in her eye if she looked toward the moon. She kept storytelling: Dar Oakley heard about People who lived a hundred lives or who never died, People who had only one eye and one leg apiece but who bested others in battle, singers and songs that caused warriors to lay down their weapons and weep like infants in shame. A woman who was three women, one of them being a Crow as large as a mountain. And always a precious thing lost and found and lost again.
They were definitely sinking, he and Fox Cap.
The moon was high now and cold and pale, and Dar Oakley didn’t know if he was sleeping or awake. The white stones that ringed the edge of the deepening pit were bright in the colorless moonlight. And as Fox Cap went on speaking, weary and nodding and yet never quite falling silent, Dar Oakley knew himself to be standing on, yes, a great body, the body of a person. The hollow where he and Fox Cap were was its wide-open mouth. Those white stone teeth were about to close on them, and they would go down its gullet into the unimaginable innards.
Why didn’t he up and fly away then, while he still could?
He told me it was because he couldn’t see to fly in the darkness of that white light. But I said, It was because you had to know how the story ended.
It was a great Beech-wood they walked in, the tall, thick gray trees all alike and no other trees intruding there. On the ground no mast, only their yellow leaves, falling singly, each one making a faint click as it joined the others on the ground. There was no other sound, no other beasts, no beings but Fox Cap and Dar Oakley, and when Fox Cap spoke, the trees seemed to wake, startled to hear her.