They went North. Dar Oakley walked beside her or rode her shoulder, and in his weariness and boredom he wondered if he had come nowhere at all, if he wasn’t still on the body-shaped hill listening to the tale she told there: as though that tale had been about her all along, about what was to come and not what had once been.
Because of where she had come from—so she told Dar Oakley—she was courted in every land by a king or a beggar or a singer or a fighter, and to every suitor she’d agree to be mated (Oh, all right) but on each wedding night she held her husband off from her with a straight arm and demanded he first tell her plainly where the Most Precious Thing could be found—whereupon he vanished away, or became something different, a moth, a stick of wood, a wave on the water.
“Because they want not to answer me,” she told Dar Oakley. “Cowards.”
The last of those who won her bore her away to a dank pavilion by a golden river, but it was the same—when she questioned him there, he became an Eel and tried to slither away into the mud. Fox Cap caught the Eel before it disappeared and made it speak to her. What kind of thing is it, the Most Precious Thing, where is it, where can it be found?
It’s nothing, the Eel said through its mouthful of teeth.
Tell me the truth, she said.
Very well—it’s everything.
Fox Cap said that one of those things must not be true, but the Eel said, Oh yes they were, both, and would she please let go?
Fox Cap squeezed harder. An Eel is a hard beast to hold on to. She said, Not till you tell where it can be found.
The Eel gasped and squirmed. Nowhere but in a vast land down under, it said, not hidden in the egg of the Crow of this world. Then it wriggled away.
“The Crow of this world?” Dar Oakley asked her.
“In this world there’s only one,” Fox Cap said, as though she now knew it to be so. “There’s only one of anything. It’s only come upon again and again, and seems to be many.”
“I see,” Dar Oakley said, but really he only sees this now, when he tells about it himself: that in a land where signs are the only things, you needed only one of each, one castle, king, lover, rival, child, animal, fish, bird, tooth, eye, cup, bed. They were nothing but what they meant, and it was what they meant that changed. That was why he could eat the livers of giant fallen fighters one after another in land after land here and not be nourished, never be full and never empty. Every cup Fox Cap drank from was as full after she drained it as before, and her thirst never grew more or less. It was that land. They stood on its far hills, watching the sly sun go down.
As on every night now he was faced with a choice, to sleep unsteadily squatting on the ground like a Quail in the shelter of Fox Cap’s mantle, or to go alone to the grove of Hazel (there was always a grove of Hazel) and listen nightlong to the leaves whispering to one another about him. Fox Cap never seemed to sleep at all.
“Why do they want to keep this thing from you, if they don’t need it themselves?” Dar Oakley asked. “I just don’t understand.” All these questions he had been forbidden to ask on the barrow’s top in the moonlight, but he would ask them now, or be no help at all to her.
“This is what the Singer told me,” Fox Cap said. “If this thing were ours, and the living never died, then no more kings and queens and cowherds and fighters would come down to this land. Their number would never grow. They would lose the homage and the gifts they get. Who’d care to remember them? Finally they’d be forgotten.”
The sun seemed to have gone down as far as it wished to and had begun climbing back up, its red face cooling as it rose.
“It’s why they steal babies,” Fox Cap said. “Why the ones in the tangled forest tricked me to follow them, and wanted me never to leave. You remember. They wish us to be with them: ever more of us.”
“Well, one day you will be.”
“Maybe not,” Fox Cap said, and laid her staff alongside her where she sat. “Maybe not.”
“But why,” Dar Oakley said, “if it’s better here—fighting and feasting all the time, no one has to dig the dirt, the killed ones up and drinking and eating, ever and ever . . .”
“It’s not better here,” Fox Cap said with cold certainty. “They say it is, but not even heroes want to come here till they must, and when they must, they weep. It’s not better. That’s why we mourn for the dead, Crow: not only for our loss but for theirs.”
The sun was high.
“Let’s go on,” Fox Cap said.
There was no way to a vast land down under that Fox Cap could find. Dar Oakley was ashamed to have been so little help to her, as little as if he had been only listening to her tell the tale of what she did and suffered. No help at alclass="underline" not until they had lost all hope, and turned from the North at last.
“I’m old,” Dar Oakley said. “I give up.”
“We’re both old,” said Fox Cap, leaning on her staff. Her back was bent. “Old as old.”
They walked again in the great gray Beech-wood, where the yellow leaves fell with a soft click one by one, and there was no other sound.
“Well, that’s peculiar,” Dar Oakley said. “That wasn’t here before.”
“We were never here before,” Fox Cap said. “Nowhere here ever before.”
“Look,” he said.
In the middle of the forest was a tree taller than any other. It was the middle of the forest only because it was so tall and there was no other like it: its singleness made the woods extend from it lone and level in all directions. Its smooth trunk, with never a branch on it, rose up to and then through the dense crowns of the smaller trees, and its top couldn’t be seen.
“I wonder,” Dar Oakley said.
He lifted his wings, made the downstroke as his aching legs pushed him aloft. He heard Fox Cap behind call to him. He got above the lesser trees and still the one tree rose up, not yet branching, and Dar Oakley thought he hadn’t the strength to reach the top—but then from out of the cloudy fog the lowest branches of the Beech at last appeared, as large themselves as full-grown trees. But what rested there, supported by them as by a hand and fingers outstretched? It was like the surfaces that People would lay in their houses over the bare dirt: a floor. He was under it. He stopped at a great branch, feet skidding on the smooth beech bark, and grew ever more certain what, or where, he had come to. Far, far down at the tree’s base he saw Fox Cap and heard faintly her call, but it was no use to answer her; she’d never be able to climb this tree to reach him.
There were gaps in the floor whose underside he looked up at, where the tree’s thickest arms or fingers went through. As soon as he could trust his wings, Dar Oakley arose again, and by arrowing through a gap he came out into the land above.
For it was a land.
That double-speaking black Eel had said, In a vast land far down under. By which words he’d named a tiny land high up.
In the mist beneath the shadow of the Beech’s immense crown lay the land’s little hills and woods, dwellings from which smoke arose. Dar Oakley glided over them, feeling enormous. There was one dwelling larger than the others, a palisade around it, and within the palisade a little black Dog and a fat black Pig. The Pig slept; the Dog looked up at Dar Oakley and seemed to know him, hate him too. The Crow didn’t care. He descended over the dwelling, and without a wing beat alighted on the reeds and thatch of the roof. No smoke came from the smoke-hole, and Dar Oakley climbed up and looked down in. There was the Crow of this world, sweeping her floor with a twiggy broom.