“If you could read, you could read a story made on the bark of these,” she said. “That’s what the green boy told me. He can read, but not me.”
Dar Oakley thought he had had plenty of story and didn’t know how one could be got out of a tree. What he wondered was why these trees shed no nuts.
“Because they never die,” Fox Cap said, “and they want no more of themselves.”
The Beeches seemed to assent to that. Dar Oakley and Fox Cap went on, and though they couldn’t see any path, it seemed the Beeches were gesturing a way for them to go—and now, far off, was the glow of what was surely a People fire, crimson in the gray.
“A fire,” Fox Cap said, and went ahead faster. Fires made places amid placelessness for People, Dar Oakley thought, a way of having a dwelling-place wherever they went. When he and Fox Cap came closer, they could see that someone sat by the fire as though to warm himself, though it was neither cold nor hot in this place. The one who sat by it never looked up as Fox Cap and the Crow on her shoulder approached him, though he seemed to know by the rustle of the dry leaves that someone was near. Fox Cap came before him, and studied his old immobile face, his eyes white as though a haw like a Crow’s had been drawn over them. Fox Cap knelt before him and put her hands on his old ones, which lay like dry husks on his knees.
Father, she said to him.
Dar Oakley knew what she’d said, though he heard no sound. In her face was something that one day he would call Pity, though he didn’t recognize it then in People, nor in himself.
Father, she said again. I’ve come from other lands. I ask for passage out of this wood. I have a long way to go.
The blind man considered this, or didn’t—he made no sign. But after a time he put out his narrow claw, palm up, asking for something (that was clear enough) to be put in it. Fox Cap searched within her clothes, finding nothing but a tiny metal cup, a thing Dar Oakley had never seen. She put it on the old beggar’s outstretched hand. He felt it there, and with the fingers of his other hand he gently examined it; he smiled, as though he’d found it to be what he’d expected to get, and tucked it away.
Father, Fox Cap said softly. May I pass here? Tell me.
Effortfully the old man’s mouth opened, as though it hadn’t done so in a long time.
Daughter, he said.
Like a breath out of a cave, or the hiss of a wavelet withdrawing down pebbled shingle. Dar Oakley barely heard it. Fox Cap’s eyes hadn’t left the old man’s gray face, but now they shone or glittered in a way Dar Oakley’d seen before and not understood.
Daughter, the man said again. Why have you come here? What are you in search of?
A thing, Fox Cap said, by which I may not ever die. Nor my kind.
No need, the beggar said. You have a Crow.
Dar Oakley, startled to hear himself spoken of, nearly lost his place on Fox Cap’s shoulder.
You have a Crow, the old one said. Crow never dies.
Not so, Dar Oakley said. Why, I . . .
But the old man had raised his hand as though to call silence, or perhaps to speak to many listeners, it was hard to tell.
It’s not a thing you ought to seek, he said. But as I love you, I will give you passage. It’s for you alone.
He put his hand inside his rags, and brought out the same little cup or cap that Fox Cap had given to him.
There, he said, and he put it in her hand as she had put it in his. That’ll do.
She studied the little thing as though she’d never seen it before. Then she nodded to the blind man with slow reverence, and though he surely couldn’t see her, he nodded to her, too. Then he lifted a skinny finger and touched her darkwise eye.
She stood, turned away from the fire, shook her head, smiling, and set out the same way she’d been going, Dar Oakley hopping after her. Their way out of the Beech-wood was clear now. For you alone the man at the fire had said, but Dar Oakley was here too, and he wasn’t going back. He didn’t mind walking along beside her; Crows after all walk for hours every day, searching for things to eat. Out of habit he looked around for such here, though there was none.
“Was that your father?” he asked Fox Cap.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“What is that thing you gave him, that he gave you?”
“A thing,” she said. She showed him: she’d put it on the tip of her longest finger, where it fit perfectly, made to go there. “It’s good that I had it, I guess.” He could see that her darkwise eye, the one the old one’s finger had touched, was no longer green as the other was but blue, the blue of lake water under dawn sun.
She held out her hand to him to mount, and turned to the way ahead, which even as she looked grew suddenly wider; it now led downward into a broad land, green and yellow, a foaming river rushing through it. Great stony mountains rose up on either side, clad in black firs; a sun setting or rising; a wind. Far off, a tower.
“The Happy Valley,” Fox Cap said, and laughed.
“Where are all the ones we saw before?” Dar Oakley asked, suddenly remembering that mob of silent beings, their pale faces looking back at him as they hustled Fox Cap away. “And where are all the ones you found and dug out of the earth and then put in again in their new places?”
“They’re in the North.”
“This is the North. You said.”
But Fox Cap told him how within the Great North there was also a north and a south to go endlessly in, and within that north also a north and a south, and the dead lay in all of them waiting. How could those places be within and yet not be smaller? To Dar Oakley within could only mean little: within an egg, within a grove, within a nut.
“It’s upside down here,” Fox Cap said. “Day’s night. Dark’s light. Left’s right. There are five directions: North, South, East, West, and Here. Here is the one that measures all the rest. It’s where you are and where you may be next. That’s the way we go.”
Dar Oakley had lost his billwise sense, and so he just went with her where she said to go. Wherever she went she seemed to be recognized or remembered, though not the Crow beside her—it was as though no one could quite perceive him there. In huts and byres she was comforted and given food and drink, but couldn’t be understood; in forts and castles she was challenged to games and fights, and promised that if she won, she’d be told what she wanted to know.
In a tower on a hill, a king offered her a bet. He said that if she let him chop off her head, she could chop off his in turn, and he would marry her and give her all that she wanted. Just in time she remembered how this trick went, and when the king’s head was off and hers was still on her shoulders—Dar Oakley can’t recall the way she did it—she held the head up by its long hair.
Now tell me, she said to it. Tell me where the Most Precious Thing can be found. In what land or place, in whose keeping.
No, the king’s head said.
You must. You promised.
Won’t, the king’s head said.
So she made a cup of the king’s skull and drank from it to hear his secret thought, and carried it as she went. The fluid that filled it tasted of iron.
“I know these folk,” she said, walking with a long stride, and confident. “I know the tales.”
“But what if he or anyone tells you the wrong place, and sends you off to where it isn’t?”
“They can’t. They have to tell the truth. In this land there are no lies.”
That might be so, but it didn’t mean they couldn’t speak in riddles or tell the truth in opposites or say one thing and mean another: for though she followed the instructions of the severed head, and the patterns of the game boards, and the songs in tree-language that the singers sang, she came no closer to the Most Precious Thing.