It was a treeless, featureless place, as though the trees here, like those in the land above, had over time been cut and burned—but the trees he had once seen here hadn’t been trees (so Fox Cap had told him) and they couldn’t be cut, and there was no time here. No time, no lies, only one of each thing.
Unless this place now was not the same place.
You needn’t fear that you won’t return from here, the Brother said. They can’t keep you. In this land there are only immortal souls, and you don’t have one. You are but a beast, and can’t sin.
If that’s so, Dar Oakley said, then how can it be that I’m here at all?
Maybe, the Brother said, you are not a bird at all, but a spirit. I’ve wondered. They said so in the Abbey, that you were. An evil spirit, or the hiding place for one.
They walked on—the Crow hopping to keep up—over broken flints that showed a faint path: the only thing that made this place a place.
I know it’s not so, the Brother said. But you aren’t an angel-guardian, either. Too naughty for that.
I am what I am, Dar Oakley said.
It may be, the Brother said, that you are a kind of middle spirit. There are many such. Spirits neither bad nor good, though they may be willful. They live long lives, maybe as long as till the Day of Judgment. But they won’t be judged. No, no, not they.
Dar Oakley couldn’t tell if it hurt the Brother to think this, that there were beings who wouldn’t be judged; if it comforted him; if he was jealous. All he knew was that this was a place where souls (the Brother said) were tested and judged, and that the Brother was afraid of that, so afraid that he could hardly stand upright the way he must go. Dar Oakley hoped he was a middle spirit; it seemed the best thing to be. He wondered what behavior he could show to prove it.
Now there should be a valley, the Brother said. A valley of shadow.
And there was: the land ahead of them became one, as though torn open just by the saying of the word valley. There might be a glitter of river down in it; it ran bare and dark to a red sunset. Dar Oakley took flight, and could see, at the head of the valley, a figure standing and looking away along it.
She. He was certain. She wore clothing she’d never worn in life; she was young here and straight and her hair was fiery. Had she got back into her flesh, flesh he had himself bitten and torn and swallowed? No, this was her down here, a soul. He tried to cry out, but though in this place he could talk—in a tongue neither his nor the Brother’s—he could not call a plain call. He flew over her to show himself to her, and she saw him and smiled, but not in recognition; and she set out on her bare feet down the way into the valley. It was clear they were to follow.
It was she, he knew it; but did she know who she was?
Blessed Saint! the Brother cried, coming up breathless and reaching out to her, but she didn’t hear, or didn’t turn, only went on, her bare feet skimming over the rocks, her gray unbelted dress moving with her steps. He remembered how the dress of those here seemed not put on but a part of them, like his own plumage. The place around her was enriched as she crossed it, though she paid no attention to that either: scurrying People half-glimpsed, strange wailings, tall cut stones with metal staples and rings embedded in them. She came to the river, black water tinged with the red of the sinking sun. A rubbled pass led down to the water’s edge past the bones of a Horse.
She watched there as though awaiting something. Her eyes were mild and unseeing.
Was this his doing too, Dar Oakley’s?
He could not be damned, the Brother said: he had no immortal soul, and couldn’t sin. Yet he did sin, and he’d lived again after dying: he had stolen that power from Fox Cap, and his sin had brought her here, when she should instead have lived forever in the sun and he should be long dead and eaten to the bones and the bones become dust. Dar Oakley longed to speak to her, hear her voice. But she had become no longer a person but a task: this task.
Soon a cockleshell boat appeared, making for shore, with two ancient Brothers in white rowing. The Brother, seeing them, rushed sliding and slipping down the bank, and Dar Oakley followed.
The two boatmen looked up but made no other sign of welcome or recognition, occupied with getting their little boat secure. Their white beards nearly reached their knees. Then one gestured to the Brother, a gathering-in gesture, and when the Brother reached them, the two pulled him aboard as he clung to them gratefully. Dar Oakley watched them push away from the bank with their oars. Should he follow? He had promised to go where the Brother went, but he wanted more to follow Fox Cap, speak to her if he could. He arose, turning: but Fox Cap was gone. He ascended up and over the no-place, but couldn’t see her. Then when he banked back toward the river, the boat was gone. So was the river. So was the way they had taken to reach this place. You never go back in again by the same way, Fox Cap had said to him so long ago. Because you never do go back anywhere. You only go on.
The sun hadn’t set, hadn’t sunk at all, as though it couldn’t. In the folds and clefts of the land beneath him, he could see People hidden or trapped, and People-shaped black beasts who were busily tormenting them—it made him think of the Wolves gang and their victims, and of Crows, too, settled on those victims, dagging for flesh and bickering. He kept flying toward the dull sun, and now he perceived large birds coming out of it, a flock, moving toward him.
No, not birds. They were beasts of earth, but with wings stuck onto their backs, which beat rapidly like the wings of Moths. Fat-bellied, with naked tails, mouths full of Wolf-teeth. How did their puny wings carry them? He was amid them, going the way they went, as though they had drawn him in. One cried aloud and pointed below: it had seen prey of some kind, and summoned the others to go down, buffeting Dar Oakley with their wings as they passed him. The smell of them was terrific. And down on the black ground he could see the Brother toiling along alone. The winged beasts—it took Dar Oakley a moment to understand this—had been seeking him.
They descended in a mass. The Brother looked up in fear, but all he could do was wave his arms at them to bat them away like hornets. They fastened on him and lifted him up, each holding a part of him, and crying in triumph they bore him away wriggling, a fish in an Osprey’s talons.
Later on, when Dar Oakley and the Brother had both returned to the land of the living, the Brother would tell Dar Oakley that it was then, just then that he was sure he was to be damned, and would never escape. Those two white-bearded Brothers who had borne him over the water? In life they had been kind to him, and when he was first committed to their care at the Abbey, they had brought him out of the despair he had felt. He had often prayed by their graves. Maybe those prayers had brought them to him at the black river, to carry him over. Holy men! But they could go no farther with him. And then he had been alone, with no help from anyone.
“The pains of Hell got hold upon me,” he’d say. “The sinners and the demons strove to drag me down with them farther into death, but I fought them off. Alone.”
Here he would pause in the tale—whenever he told it, which was often—and look up to the sky as though for pity, and then at Dar Oakley in reproach—oh, how well the Crow had come to know such People faces!—and Dar Oakley would mumble like a fledgling in apology, though there was nothing he’d done wrong. He knew it. The angel who had judged him down there had told him so.
How long Dar Oakley searched for the Brother in the dark valley he can’t say—a day, a year, a season—because none of those were discernible there. Even the valley itself wasn’t always there. If he looked for it below him, he could see it, but if he looked away from it, he’d have to search for it again, as though his looking were all that brought it into being.