PART 1
DAR OAKLEY IN THE COMING OF YMR
CHAPTER ONE
Before the mountain at the world’s end was built on the river plain, before the high city there grew up, before most of the Ravens went away into the forests of the deep North, before the People’s long rage to kill Crows, before Dar Oakley’s sea-journey to the West, before the Most Precious Thing was found and lost again, before the ways were opened to the lands of the dead, before there were names in Ka, before Ymr came to be and therefore before Ka knew itself, Dar Oakley first knew People.
Dar Oakley didn’t have that name then, or any name. It would be eons before Crows had each a name, as they do now; then, no, they had no need of them, they called those around them Father, Brother, Older Sister, Other Older Sister; those they didn’t know as relations, or forgot in what degree, were spoken of as Those Ones, or Others, or All of Them There, and so on. And since they had little to say about other Crows or very much need to talk about them when not in their presence, this was enough.
But without names it’s impossible to remember stories, and hard to tell them. So Dar Oakley will begin as Dar Oakley in this one.
There weren’t many Crows then. Or rather there were very many, all around the world; but not many in any one place. Where Dar Oakley had been hatched and fledged, except in the winter roosts that drew Crows from far away, there were not more Crows than any one of them could know by sight and voice. If it were to happen that an unknown Crow came trespassing among them, he or she would be seen off, or at least kept at bay a long time; many seasons could pass during which a strange pair would remain strangers, and even when they were accepted, no one would forget they weren’t really Us.
Dar Oakley’s parents were two such. Where they came from, where their birth flock had its demesne, why they left and came here, Dar Oakley never knew: for as soon as they could, they forgot it themselves, each wanting only to belong here, one of these Crows; eventually they would be as disparaging about newcomers as the rest. Even so, from their birth Dar Oakley’s older brothers and sisters were looked on with suspicion, everyone sure they could still detect something different, something not-Us, about them: and one by one they left the flock, to seek out brothers and sisters who had left before them, or to be strangers elsewhere, no one knew where—or indeed if there was a Where or a There to go to.
So these Crows weren’t just like the Crows in the fields and woods beyond my house.
But that demesne between the wide, shallow river and the forest was a fine one for a flock such as that one was then. Most years the river flooded its plain in the spring, which kept the tall growth and the young trees down. There were mussels and fish in the river—when the Salmon ran, a family of Bears would fish there, and their leavings were rich—and there were grubs and Voles and quick red Newts and a thousand other things in the earth. Crows ventured across the river and up over the foothills of the stony and densely forested mountain, but never very far; nor did they often go far into the woods that began where Hemlocks grew at the river-meadow’s edge, though they claimed them as theirs to an indeterminate distance. The woodlands provided them with the cadavers of small animals, with snails and slugs and the eggs and nestlings of other birds when such could be got, and big dead things they could pick over with the Ravens when the Wolves were done with them. There was enough for all, but not much more. Winters were hard, and they ranged farther then for food, even over the heath to the big lake that lay darkwise from their demesne; but the rest of the year they stayed close to the places they were born and claimed as theirs. Far beyond where they went were other Crows, Crows they had no dealings with, and who themselves rarely left their own demesnes.
That was how it had been forever, a past too long and featureless to be remembered, and rarely spoken of. When they talked, these Crows mostly talked about the weather.
And then the People came.
A long while after that, for all the wealth they’d get as a result, for all that they flourished and multiplied as never before, old Crows of that flock would sometimes say, I wish they’d never come over the mountain, or crossed the river; I wish they’d never come at all.
They could say such things because by then Crows had learned the trick of thinking that the world could be different from the way it is, and therefore to wish it was.
Dar Oakley invented that. So he would say.
Dar Oakley’s family freehold was far off from the others, one that had been claimed by the parents in the early years when they were outsiders. It wasn’t rich. It fed his mother and his father, his mother’s Servitor (a melancholy male who had loved her since he was a fledgling), and himself and two sisters. They were the nestlings of that spring who had survived infancy, their coats still not the lustrous black of grown-ups, all three of them still needing to be watched, though they didn’t think so themselves. And a young vagrant such as Dar Oakley’s parents had once been, who kept warily apart and had yet to communicate much with the rest but who was tolerated, perhaps for long-ago’s sake. In autumn Dar Oakley reached the age to be a watcher—not all by himself, his task was only whatever word was given him by his mother or father or the Servitor perched in a high spot. Through the day they all moved over their reach of ground, walking its well-known hillocks and streams, looking for anything interesting and possibly edible. At each move they posted a watch, a couple or three of them who listened for calls from distant families and watched the sky and the trees and the ground for Hawks, or Foxes, or other intruders. Only after the call-and-response was done—All right? All right here, as I see—would they descend to eat.
Dar Oakley liked to take a wind-shaken perch absurdly high in the tallest tree around, where he could see threats come from miles off, if there had been any threat, which there had never been in his short life; the common threats to cry out about—a Weasel, a Fox, a Hawk—were close at hand. Often enough he wasn’t really watching, only looking; sometimes he’d forget to eat at his turn, gazing over the far reaches beyond the flock’s habitations, wondering what that was that he could see but not quite resolve. How far that way could a Crow go?
He had a talent for getting lost on sleepy afternoons when the others lay listless in the autumn sun or nodded in the Hemlocks: gone by the time his mother called for him, too far to hear her. Much as he loved his family and still followed his mother and father as he had in the spring, he never minded finding himself alone. He liked thinking, when he was far away, that he was overseeing or standing in places no Crow of his flock had ever gone to.
Never lost, though, really: not when that dot of certainty like a compass needle behind his bill, between his eyes—all Crows have it—could always point him north, “billwise” they say, and thus also daywise, east, and darkwise, west. (Crows—at least nowadays—have oddly no word for south. Perhaps that sense in their heads means both south and north at once. I’ve never determined.)