Dar Oakley watches the Brother raise his sword high and cheer (he can’t hear it in all the noise of the fight, but he can see the Brother’s exulting tongue and teeth). The other Wolves have thrown themselves on the ground before their attackers, faces down, hands up, and the Dux and his cohort stand over them, threatening but not attacking, like Crows around an Owl. None of the Wolves has escaped.
The Brother has slid from the horse’s back and kneels by the bird-beast, the man he has killed. An old grizzled man. Dar Oakley thinks of the time the Brother knelt to pray by the dead pony in the snow, when he and the Crows first met, which has brought Dar Oakley here now. The Brother crosses himself and covers his eyes with a hand.
“Kin, are we?” says a Crow at Dar Oakley’s ear. Dar hasn’t noticed Va Thornhill settle by him, but now turns to find the bigger bird’s eye on him.
You will betray.
Given the Crow’s reputation among us People, it’s hard to credit what Dar Oakley insists on: that a Crow can’t lie to another Crow, simply hasn’t the trick of it. Boast, evade, mock, exaggerate, confuse: but not lie. So to Va Thornhill he can answer nothing but nothing.
That’s how I have imagined it: what I would have seen if I had been in that glen at the place where the path narrows between the rocks. It’s what I make of Dar Oakley’s story as he tells it now, what he saw and what he could name then of People things and People acts. We can only think about those things we can name, and his thought is Crow thought and is not mine; but if he can think about me, and my kind, maybe I can think as he does, and as he did then. If he can be in Ymr, I can be in Ka.
In Ymr then—at least in that wide part of the human world, at whose western edge, I believe, Dar Oakley then lived—all People were divided into three: those who tend the land and the flocks; those who ride Horses and bear arms; and those who pray, make sacrifices, remember stories and tell them. It was as though there were different People species, and (like Crows and Rooks) they couldn’t mix. But they could, and did; stories from that world are full of People who behaved not as the kind they were born to be but as one of the other kinds, and some of them triumphed and lived happily, and some were made to suffer for it. The Brother had triumphed—Dar Oakley had seen it, in the shadow of the glen—and now must suffer.
“I took up arms,” he told Dar Oakley, as they went along. “A priest of God, my hands consecrated to his service. Those hands spilled human blood, and I have to do penance.”
Dar Oakley could perceive the Brother’s shame and sorrow, but really, People happily killed People all the time—at least those with weapons did—and why should this one feel sorry? What he’d done—it was good for People!
But he set out with the Brother again for the holy place to which the Brother had told his Abbot he would travel, to see what the Brother would do there, and what penance meant. The Crows of the region, Va Thornhill’s flock, angry at having their good living interfered with, pursued him and the Brother a long way, yelling threats and insults that Dar Oakley tried to ignore. What penance would he be made to undertake? Best to be gone till they forgot about it, if they ever did.
Soon enough the two of them had left that demesne and entered another, where Dar Oakley knew no one. He’d fly on far ahead of the Brother to forage—snails, grubs, small cadavers—being careful not to alarm or challenge anyone nearby; and then he’d return to the Brother, no matter how far they’d gone apart. That seemed miraculous to the Brother, but it was only that Dar Oakley could see him from a long way off, and follow his movements.
The Brother couldn’t or wouldn’t eat Crow food, though his discipulus (as he had come to call Dar Oakley) brought it to him like a good Crow parent. Instead, with his seashell he begged at houses and from travelers, giving blessings in return for food and small coins, asking the way to the place ahead, which he named and many of them knew.
“Saints have been served by beasts,” he told Dar Oakley as they went along. “The Saint we go toward now. When she was young, no one would listen to her preach. The pagans clamored to kill her, Discipule, and she fled to the forest. There she preached to the birds and the animals. A family of Foxes came, vixen and kits, and sat patiently to listen, and in time became devoted to the Saint; when she returned to the People and converted many to the Faith, this Fox family remained with her, serving her to the end of her days.”
The road had widened, and become plain, and there were more People on it. Some walked with sticks propped under their arms, some were carried in trundles pushed by others. So many of them, faces fixed on the way ahead. Dar Oakley, unsettled and oppressed, ascended away.
How many stories did that Brother know, and why did he have to keep on telling them? It was disturbing. When you heard one, you thought of yourself in it, seeing it happen, which it never had, not anyway to you. It put things into your eyes that your eyes hadn’t seen but now they must. De te fabula, the Brother would say when a story was done, lifting an instructing finger: the story is about you.
Thinking these thoughts, he’d gone on a good way, not paying attention. But something that had been growing in him all morning now came clear to him. In an elongated moment, wing beats slowing, he understood that he knew this place, which he should not know. He knew it, and he knew he knew.
Not the new road, and the People all going one way. Not the folded land all bare of trees now and covered with plowed fields and People houses like mushroom patches. But yes, the line of the darkwise mountains. The ragged shape of that long lake he was approaching, the silver shudder of sunlight across it and the waterbirds rising. He set out over it. There would be an island in the middle of the water, he knew, where he’d rested on the day that he, or the Crow he was then, had first seen People: and yes, there it was, where it had been. But that high round stone building that sat on it, stones laid on stones—that had not been there. Now treeless, the island seemed larger than it had been, as though the waters had receded and bared more land.
When there were trees there and nothing else, he had one day—hadn’t he?—convinced his flock amid their uproar and doubts and mocking that they could make a living from the People.
Once there was a Crow who learned how to feed his clan on the flesh of dead People, but now we have forgotten the trick of it.
That had been him, yes, he had taught them that then.
The land rising from the lakeshore, where the People had built a settlement: he recognized it. That rocky ledge breaking from the hillside above it, and the way up to it that the People had climbed, carrying their dead. He could see them climbing, though they weren’t there.
Fox Cap. He remembered Fox Cap.
Child lost in the woods within sight of home. Peacemaker neither male nor female. Walker into worlds where time didn’t pass. Through her he had come to know Ymr, how large it was, how it was all made of meanings, which fill it without taking up any space at all. She was—of course!—the reason why he had understood the Brother’s speech and his stories from the first. Why he was spoken to by People who were dead, from the realm of stories where they lived. He, Dar Oakley, was himself inside a story, which was also inside him, packed within him like another Crow, and he knew now why he had for so long felt both crowded and empty.
He banked over the eternal great cross of the ways—billwise, daywise, darkwise, otherwise. From the lakeshore, where now pilgrims milled and rickety houses of wood stood on posts out in the water, he had once seen the boat set out that carried the Singer’s excarnated bones to be buried. The boat that in time bore hers as well.