“But why do these Wolves make themselves appear to be beings that they aren’t?”
The Biggers made gestures of ignorance or indifference. “Frighten the ones they hunt?” Fin Blue-Eye guessed.
“Who cares?” Va Thornhill said. “Let’s eat while there’s wealth left.”
They fell on the dead one lying faceup, the easiest to enter and already much dug into. As he grabbed and bit the cold flesh, Dar Oakley thought of the Brother, who had told him to give his fellow Crows good counsel. Likely they wouldn’t listen to him, even if he knew what good counsel was. But the thought of the Brother brought into his mind an image of the dish of stones on the floor of his cell, with only one last dark stone left this day to be moved: and Dar Oakley realized, with a tickle of discomfort and hilarity, that he was eating flesh on a Friday.
Only one of those People who had met with the Wolves gang had been able to run away. Near exhaustion from fear and flight through the dark and cold, he brought the news of the attack to the Abbey. He told them what he had seen, a huge bird, a Bull-Bear—beings not men, fog-demons perhaps. He told the Brothers that he and his family, good Christians, had been on their way to this Abbey, bringing with them the youngest son, who was to be given to the Brothers, an oblation; they’d brought other gifts too, now all stolen; and the boy dead with his parents. The Brothers armed themselves with a tall cross and went out pulling a cart to bring back the dead ones for burial. The Crows fled at their approach, watching resentfully from afar as the Brothers knelt to pray and then wrapped the poor despoiled bodies in cloths and bore them away, weeping over the blond child whom God had allowed to be taken.
All of which the Brother related to Dar Oakley, more than once.
“Brigands,” he said, mopping his brow with his sleeve. “Outlaws. Thieves and murderers.”
The Brother was given the task of digging a grave for the boy, another for the parents. He stood leaning on his shovel while two of the People who lived nearby and depended on the Abbey for their livelihoods dug. Around them, beneath the earth, were the Brother’s own father and mother (he’d pointed out to Dar Oakley where they were) and other kin.
“Men less than men,” he said. “Men who would kill like beasts for gain. Twisted into evil shapes by the beast-souls within. Homo homini lupus.”
Dar Oakley, up on a stone churchyard cross, nodded when the Brother said these things, cautious and obedient, not sure if the Brother had recognized him among the flock feeding on the dead People. He’d fled away with the others when the Brother had chased them off with his baculus, little stick, not a weapon but standing for a weapon (or for the lack of one). Now he looked down at the long, narrow vacancies the People were making, lined with stones. Where had he seen such work done before? A place for People to hide away their dead ones.
“Demons!” the Brother cried, and the ones doing the digging looked up in alarm. “Demons, devils out of Hell, sent to harry the blessed. Why would the good God allow them to?” He set to work, lifting a little dirt and tossing it. “We can’t know. You angels, conduct him safely into paradise, blessed child!” And he touched forehead, breast, and shoulders the way they all did all the time.
Toward evening they carried the dead boy from the church on a board that they lifted to their shoulders. The boy was wrapped head to toe and couldn’t be seen. With the tall cross the Abbot led them to the place the Brother had dug, and there they gently laid him, all singing all the while: calling God’s attention to the place, so that the child soul could know his way back to this place on the last day to rejoin the body. The parents they bore out and put together in the larger hole beside him.
Dar Oakley—having a sort of role on this day as cruel Death’s representative—sat looking down from the capstone of the churchyard cross and was not chased away.
As the Brothers spoke and sang, earth was thrown in on the wrapped People. One Brother carried a pot hung from a strap, in which hot coals had been put. Another took a handful of something from a pouch and scattered it over the coals.
Gray smoke arose. A puff of wind brought it to Dar Oakley. The rictal bristles above his nostrils rose: he had breathed in this smoke before, this heavy odor, somewhere, sometime; not here, not in the life he lived now. In Ymr. What is Ymr? This is Ymr: the world around drawing close to him, the People and People things large, the farther-off things small and vague. All in a moment he was no longer where he had been; but where he now was he had been before.
He saw his Brother go to the Abbot and kneel and speak rapidly to him: Dar Oakley could hear and understand. The Brother was asking permission to remain by the boy’s grave and pray through the night. The Abbot—tiny, sun-browned, and withered like a winter apple—wouldn’t allow it; the Brother begged again, bowing nearly to the Abbot’s gnarled feet.
“He was as I once was,” the Brother said. “I too was an oblation, my family’s gift. I was his age then.”
The Abbot looked up to the sky as though he saw something there, and put his hand on the Brother’s head and nodded.
Day was nearly gone when the hole the boy was laid in was filled again with the earth that had been taken from it, and his kin in their grave also covered. An Abbey servant brought a thick candle or torch made of bound reeds and butter, and a stone bottle of water, and placed these beside the Brother. The other Brothers departed, casting looks of annoyance at their Brother that Dar Oakley noticed and felt.
Then they two were alone.
Watch with me, said the Brother, in speech not like his common speech.
I will, Dar Oakley said without speaking—at least not in words of Ka—and the Brother nodded in gratitude.
So they stayed, the Crow on the cross, the Brother on his knees below. Now and then the Brother got up groaning from his knees and cast a pinch of the odorous stuff into the candle flame, where it let out its smoke, and Dar Oakley, near sleep, would wake again.
His bones rest here, the Brother said. His soul goes up.
Up? Dar Oakley asked.
Good souls go up, the Brother said, to live forever in heaven above; bad souls go down, far down under, to live in darkness.
Dar Oakley didn’t know this, about the soul that the Brothers talked of so often, a part of People that became detached at death. He thought he had once known something like it but something different. The smoke tasted of what he had known.
One day, the Brother said, when all things are accomplished, souls will return again to their bodies. So we pray here by this boy, that he will know the way to this gate of his resurrection, and not wander in the forest where the wild axmen killed him, unable to find where he lies.
I know who killed him, Dar Oakley said. I saw them.
Corve! said the Brother. Who are they? Where are they?
Dar Oakley didn’t know how to answer that. He thought about it. He fell asleep, and slept till the smell of the smoke woke him again.
It was near dawn, a faint light almost darker than darkness.
Corve, said the Brother. Look.
The earth and stones piled high over the place where the boy lay seemed to shift; pebbles rolled away—Dar Oakley thought it might be only the candle’s shaky light. But then he heard it too. The click of little stones rolling away together.
Something appeared there, at the center of the pile, something bright, yellow like a candle flame, but steady. It was poking out of the dirt, as though pushed up from below. The Brother was still, staring, whispering in his other sacred language.
What is it? Dar Oakley asked.
A ladder, the Brother said.
More of it appeared: the rails, then a rung, then another. Dar Oakley knew what a ladder was; the rails of this one bent together at the top, like the ladders the Brothers used for apple picking.