Golden, said the Brother.
Dar Oakley knew about gold. It was smooth and heavy, heavier than stone; or it was beaten thin, like bark. Sun-colored, not like silver. But this gold was not like that, and not like the gold of the Brothers’ special vessels, either.
The ladder kept coming up out of the ground, rung after rung, reaching toward the dark sky. Then there was more disturbance of the grave-earth, something more coming forth. A blond head, golden too.
Laudate dominum, the Brother whispered.
Two white hands appeared, fumbling out of the wrappings they had been bound in so as to grip the ladder’s rails and pull the boy from the grave. As he came out, the cloths around him fell away, and he could be seen to be whole, unharmed, the wounds on him healed or gone. All white, almost translucent, like an Owl’s egg; he glowed, enough to light the air around and the Brother, watching him unmoving, hands apart and lifted. In paradisum deducat te angeli.
The naked boy was now well off the ground and mounting higher. The top of the ladder couldn’t be seen; it disappeared into darkness. Before he, too, climbed up too high to be seen, the boy turned his glowing head on the Brother and the Crow.
You who ate me, he said. You who gathered me. You who dug a place for me. Remember me. Killed in the bud before I could learn to pray and taste God on my tongue. Remember me, mourn for me, and in Christ’s name I charge you, avenge me.
He looked up, then, as though to see how far up he still had to climb, and stepped to the next rung. A groaning or stirring came from the grave where his parents lay: calling him back? Asking for his help?
I never did, Dar Oakley said. I never ate him, I didn’t. Not him.
He watched the boy go out of sight, grow as dim as the clouded moon, then dim as a star, and gone, and the ladder followed him up. Day came.
“Corve,” the Brother said to Dar Oakley. “You must go away from this place, and on pain of death never return.”
They stood within the outermost of the three low concentric walls of stones and earth around the Abbey. Dar Oakley clung to the Brother’s hand. The Brothers and the Abbot, gathered there, all watched as Dar Oakley was cast, took wing, sank, rose, and was gone over the church-top. All of them crossed themselves and murmured.
No one believed the Brother had seen what he said he saw or had heard what he said he heard, and the Brother offered no witness except a Crow, who couldn’t speak, and who in the light of day wasn’t so sure himself. The Abbot thought it likely that the Brother had dreamed a deceiving dream. The Confessor asked why a saved soul would ask for vengeance; none would; they ask for mercy. The Brothers said their little Brother had been perverted by a devil in the form of a Crow: no true vision would be vouchsafed to such a one.
So a trial was held; Dar Oakley was declared anathema and sent away.
On the next Sunday the Brother went to the Abbot and begged to be allowed to make a pilgrimage, so that he might do penance for his foolishness and pray at a holy shrine for the soul of the boy, the soul that he now agreed he hadn’t seen. The Abbot, after a time of prayer and thought, said he might. It was the time of year for pilgrimage. No other Brother, however, chose to go along with him. The Brother took this without rancor or spite—the Confessor thought his experiences might have changed him—and on a green morning he set out alone, with a little food and drink in his leather satchel, a stout staff, a seashell for a begging bowl, and the Abbot’s kiss of peace on his cheeks.
The Abbey had fallen well behind him when he reached the stream that marked the limits of the Brothers’ demesne. From the branches of a willow growing by the bank Dar Oakley called.
“Corve,” the Brother called up to him. “The Willow is an evil tree. How can you sit in one?”
Dar Oakley crowed in delight. It was this tree, by this bend in the stream, by this islet where roses grew, that he had been told to visit every day until the Brother came to meet him; and it tickled the Crow strangely, how glad he was to see him again. He descended upon him, took a perch in the rough woolen stuff by his ear, and spoke the Crow word—one of the few the Brother had come to know—that means Tell me more.
“Well, the Willow,” the Brother said, girding up the skirts of his robe. “Everyone knows. In the night the Willow can pull up his roots and go walking like a man around and about; and might come up silently behind a traveler, take him in his long withies, and strangle him!”
He laughed, Dar Oakley laughed, and the Brother waded into the fast stream, stepping with care on the stony bottom and feeling with his staff. On the far bank the path went on, leading toward the holy site, some days’ walk away. Before they two came to it, they would reach the hall of the Brother’s clan.
“Are those of your kind ready?” the Brother asked. “Did you explain? Are they going to do it?”
Dar Oakley becked in answer. They were ready.
“Then let’s go on,” the Brother said, wringing the water from his robe, “to the hall of my kin, and do what we were charged to do.”
Dar Oakley knew about clans—he was himself of a clan, no matter that he had gone away from it for periods. But his clan wasn’t like a People’s clan. People knew the ones to whom they were related, and in exactly what degree; their clans included the dead, from whom they got their status and wealth, if they had any, and to whom they owed care and labor and the prayers that would help them go Up. It seemed to Dar Oakley that People were often uncertain whether one of these dead had gone Up, like the white soul he had seen, or Down, where the Brother said almost everyone he knew would go. Most weren’t Up or Down but in a middle place, and maybe it was thought that the prayers and the singing of the Brothers and rich gifts to the Abbey could push them Up. Dar Oakley couldn’t say. Crows have no dead to please or help.
After his banishment from the Abbey, before he went to meet the Brother at the Willow by the stream, Dar Oakley went home, to the old demesne—which was no journey at all, and yet was a long one: from Ymr into Ka.
They were glad to see him there; he was always good for a laugh, he and his People and his stories.
“Va Thornhill,” he said, having found Va busy hunting for nest materials in a thicket. “I have a question.”
“What’s your question, Dar Oakley?”
“Do you still follow those People who are Wolves?”
“Ha!” Va Thornhill said. “Their pack’s grown. No one’s as powerful as they. Don’t let your Brothers near them now.”
“They don’t need you anymore, then?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You’re still scouting for them.”
“We have been. Sometimes. And getting the riches they leave.”
Dar Oakley on a branch above snapped open his broad tail and spread his wings in a shudder—the Crow equivalent of a yawn and a stretch. “You,” he said, “are a smart Crow.”
Va Thornhill lifted some mossy stuff in his bill and blew it out.
“I’ll tell you something,” Dar Oakley continued. “I listen to People and hear about their doings. Say I were to learn about People who were intending to go over the mountain, along the path they have through the forest where your Wolves go. If I told you about that, would you bring your Wolves there? Would they follow?”
Crows, I think, detest bargains. They don’t speculate, and they don’t like the future—for which they had no word then. “Well,” Va Thornhill said. “Just now it’s hard to get Crows together.”
“Ah yes,” said Dar Oakley. “Nests. Freeholds. Young.”
Va Thornhill looked up and billwise and darkwise, as though he would prefer not to discuss these homely things with the other Crow. “It’s busy now, is all.”