That was dreadful to think: one of her kind. As though he’d been caught in the sticky stuff that People coated the branches of trees with, to trap small birds that settled on them unaware. Foolish birds, caught as no Crow would ever be.
He lifted himself on wings that had grown heavy. It was those People words he had learned, the speech of hers he had drunk down like nectar: that was what had caused it, and they couldn’t be given back, spat out. He could go far from here, far from the lake and her People, but for him now there was no place in all of Ka where Ymr was not too.
Let them carry her, then, those Crows who didn’t care where she was bound, or to what land. It was as well. She knew the way. It was her own land now, and she would come there honored as a singer, and by her singing be one of those who kept its secrets forever from the living. As for him, it was as true to say there was no land now that was his, no reason to be in one place and not another; no reason not to go someplace else, and no reason to stay.
How far Dar Oakley went from the Lake People’s towns, how long he lived in the places to which he came, he’s unable to tell me. He sank back into Crow time, without history. He ate and yakked with the Crows of that region, who still had no names; he stopped counting the moons, and no one told him the day on which the summer ended and the winter began. Those Crows followed Ravens who followed the Wolves of the high forest and ate what was left of the Elk and the Deer that the Wolves brought down, after the Ravens had had their fill. In time he was a Bigger there and sat on a branch and kept watch, waiting for the smaller and younger ones to eat before he descended: that was what a Bigger did. In winter roosts he took the center of the flock, exchanging talk with others of his status. Mostly they talked about the weather.
He had a mate, and then another; he had young. They grew up, they grew old and died, but not Dar Oakley. As time went on, he’d now and then tell one or another of his stories, unable not to: to his offspring, before they could understand; to a Bigger who might beck in acknowledgment or shake his head in wonder but more likely’d pay no attention; to the trees.
Then on a hot day in early summer, high bare sun suddenly intense, a band of Crows were laid out on a grassy slope in that peculiar state they get into sometimes in the hot sun: spread flat as though killed, unmoving, eyes hooded and bills open, “drugged” we’d say now by heat. Dar Oakley one of them. If you or I had been there, we could almost have picked him up unresisting.
As they lay there, passing the occasional comment about warmth, or sun, or nothing much, a steady sound began to be heard off darkwise from where they lay, a high crashing or jangling, a thudding too that traveled through the ground and into their wings and bodies stretched over it. Most of the sun-stunned Crows paid no attention, but Dar Oakley felt an odd trepidation come over him, and after a time he pulled his scattered limbs together and arose, flying low and then mounting higher, just to see. He knew, he thought he knew, what it might be, what sort of thing. He rose up high enough to see them roll up out of the far daywise.
It was People, yes, as he’d known it had to be, and lots of them, but not a kind of People he’d ever seen. They strode along all together, and the striking of their feet was what shook the ground, so many of them there were; and they were almost covered with metal plates, glossy and blazing in the sun, and high glittering caps, and long shields of metal that it seemed it would take great strength to carry. Ahead of all these stampers came a few on horses, also in shining metal—even their leg-wrappings and skirts seemed made of it. Banners and signs aloft, with birds attached to them, or signs of birds rather: raptors, you could tell that’s what they were meant to be. They were all on the way to battle, certainly, somewhere.
Dar Oakley saw in his mind Fox Cap long ago raising her arm as though to bring forth the battles she saw were to come one day. They aren’t our kind, she’d said to him. They come from where we’ve never been. There will be many of them, and they can’t be stopped.
The ones on horses in the front now pointed up at the Crow flying over, and laughed and spoke to one another. Dar Oakley banked, returning, watching them. Who were they, why did they laugh? He remembered the first People he had ever seen, how they had raised their spears to him. The Bigger of these—his cloak was red, they all looked to him—now called to one of the others near him; that one took from his back an instrument of some kind, drew from a carrier a slim stick, and combined the two. Dar Oakley circled, fascinated. The thing was pointed at him.
He might have evaded the arrow if he’d known he ought to, but it was as when he and another Crow—a parent, a friend, Kits—would toss a stick between them, drop it from a height so the other could catch it, and again. This fast-flying stick struck him under the darkwise wing and pierced the plumage, went through the ribs and ruptured the aorta.
Death is not an event in life, the philosopher says. We can imagine how the commander in red praised the archer, how the legion cheered, how they passed over the Crow body, their horses and shod feet kicking it apart. But Dar Oakley knew none of it. He was dead: dead as dead.
PART 2
DAR OAKLEY AND THE SAINTS
CHAPTER ONE
I want to understand about the dead, how it is they are in more than one place at the same time, or in no place at all, which is perhaps the same thing. I want to understand just as Dar Oakley does—I mean I want to understand, and so does he; and also I want to understand in the way that he can.
Of course he may be telling me nothing at all, he may understand nothing. A sick Crow found in my backyard that I took up and cared for and fed, for no reason I could then have named. The little black head I peer into, the voice I think I listen to and transcribe, may be nothing more than a living Ouija board, voices heard in falling water. Maybe you could call it folie à deux: I came to believe he speaks, and because I believed it, he came to believe it too.
My wife never cared anything for afterworlds or otherworlds, and though while she was alive my interest was carried on in what I would have described as a form of high irony, Debra suspected a greater commitment than I would admit to. She’d ask—sometimes without asking—how we two could have ended up together.
What was odd about Debra’s this-worldness was how much she cared about the fate of her self and her life after death. She wanted to know where her body would eventually be put (I, she always said, not my body), and as soon as her diagnosis was clear and it was certain there wasn’t an effective treatment, she began to consider the disposition of what might be called her extended self: her things, repositories of memories like letters and diaries, gifts and messages for this and that person in her life. I was to keep careful track of all this and remember it when she couldn’t. She’d drill me on various clauses and sub-clauses of this evolving (and never actually written) testament. I still have it. In here.
Isn’t that strange? Maybe it isn’t strange at all. She was sure that death closed her life like a book; she didn’t think that the physical books she gave to carefully considered recipients would cause her to live on in their possession or reading of them. And yet to her the continuation of her stuff was her continuation. Of course it was: her other world was this world. I couldn’t say to her that she seemed to be distributing the parts of herself through the world so that like Osiris she could someday be reconstituted. She’d have laughed at that. She was simply tidying up, with just time enough to do the job until the last list was handed off to me. For the ultimate continuation of her is me.