I don’t have any, Dar Oakley said.
Don’t lie! You were there with him in the rocks of the glen. Tell about his sword, his wicked grin, tell about the joy with which he cleft the head of his victim!
I don’t remember that, Dar Oakley said, and he didn’t, but at the demon’s telling of it he began to.
Speak, the demon demanded. Or you’ll go into the fires yourself. How would you like that?
Stop it, the angel said. You are coercing the witness.
They went on disputing, but Dar Oakley stopped listening. He had begun to see—perhaps because of his Crow eyes, set far apart, able to take so much in—that all around others were likewise being judged. Countless debates like this one were proceeding on stone piles and ledges, countless People souls thrust wriggling into the fire by beast-things, a few escaping up the slippery bridge to the shining towers as winged black things tried to pluck them off.
Long ago Fox Cap had told him: in Ymr is a thing of every kind there can be, but only one of each. In this place, though, Dar Oakley saw only one kind of thing, endlessly repeated.
I hate it here, he said. And in his own tongue: “I hate it here.” The towers and the mountain shuddered as though they heard.
Death-bird, the demon called, as though from far away. You will answer, or serve me here forever.
No, Dar Oakley said. I’m not of this realm. You can’t keep me here. Fubun on all of you.
Corve! the Brother whispered, and put out a warning hand. But Dar Oakley knew it was true, whatever they thought. The Brother could be judged and suffer here, but he, Dar Oakley, couldn’t. Not because he was a living being, not because he was a Middle Spirit, not because he hadn’t sinned, but because he wasn’t here at all.
You, he said. You are all of Ymr. I am of Ka. I am not yours.
He stretched his wings, lowered himself, beat down as he leapt upward, and was aloft, drawing his feet to his body. Hell fell away below him faster than he could fly up into what should have been sky but grew ever blacker, with clouds like dark boulders; it was as though he could reach and touch it. In not many wing beats he first felt and then saw another being near behind and then passing him: it was the Brother, his robe on him again, sandals drooping from his flying feet. Dar Oakley caught up with him and fastened to him; he lost his sight; there was an odor of earth and dank stone, an awful closeness drawing closer, holding them.
Then nothing.
Then the Brother’s voice, his ordinary voice, next to his ear: “When will we be gone downward?”
He could smell the Brother’s flesh. “We’ve come back,” he said. The Brother didn’t respond, but when a heavy clanking came from above them, he startled and stirred. A strip of day. The door out of Hell. It opened wider.
“What became of me?” the Brother asked, and Dar Oakley couldn’t answer. Hands were reaching in to pull him out, and the Crow that rode on him as well. Glad cries, praise to God, sunlight and the air of day.
On the long way back to their home places through the summer days Dar Oakley and the Brother tried together to account for all that had happened in the time they had spent below; neither could quite remember it. But the little that one of them could summon up, when added to what the other was prompted to remember, and the dogmas the Brother held about what ought to take place there, became a story as they walked and talked.
Talked: Somehow being in the hole of the Singer and the land of Fox Cap had revealed to the Brother that Dar Oakley spoke a tongue of his own, one that the Brother could learn to understand, though not to speak; and as they went on day after day he did learn it, word by word, thought by thought. While they paddled in cool streams, lay in the sun half-asleep, looked for berries, they talked. Talked and talked.
How had the Brother escaped the judgment of the demon, Dar Oakley wanted to know. Well, the angel, blessed be she, had simply overruled the demon, and dressed the Brother in his priest’s garb again; and the demon in fury had flung the loathly burnt soul of the brigand at him, crying, Repent that!—and look, the black smuts of that were still on him.
“Oh,” said Dar Oakley.
It was toward evening on the third day that they parted, the Brother to go on to the Abbey now not far away, to confess all that he had done—as he now clearly remembered the angel had commanded him to do—and Dar Oakley to the night roost of his brothers and sisters. Both of them were apprehensive about their reception.
As he neared the old demesne, Dar Oakley detected Crows, all going one way, calling to others to follow, and he went after them. Soon he could hear calls from on ahead, where it seemed food had been found. The find was big, whatever it was. He’d likely find Va Thornhill there.
And there indeed he was. Atop something People had erected, made of lengths of wood and rope. People corpses were slung on it like killed Deer or Hares, ropes around their necks and binding their arms. Pretty far gone in decay. Crows upon them, searching for a grip in their filthy garb, putting their heads into breasts and bowels.
“Hello, Dar Oakley,” Va Thornhill called. “Where’ve you been?”
Dar Oakley didn’t answer that. He settled at a careful distance from the Bigger. “Your Wolves?” he asked.
“That’s right. As you see. There’ll be no more wealth to be had from them.”
“But,” Dar Oakley said, “here they are for you at least.”
Va Thornhill with a cold eye stepped sidewise along the gibbet toward Dar Oakley. “How true,” he said. He stepped closer. “You,” he said, “are one smart Crow.”
Dar Oakley moved off as many steps as Va Thornhill had come toward him, and his shoulder plumage rose. But the Bigger only laughed and lofted himself away, heavy with food.
Well, at least he hadn’t been driven off. Dar Oakley in the darkening day studied the dead brigands, eyeless and tongueless and burst-bellied. He was hungry. But— “You,” he said to one.
The Wolf-Bird brigand made no reply, though his single dangling eyeball turned toward the Crow. Dar Oakley spoke again, in the secret language of Ymr.
I know you, he said. I saw you, down there. Why are you out of Hell?
Why, this is Hell, said the lipless brigand; nor am I out of it.
CHAPTER THREE
For stealing the toe-bone of the Saint and giving it to the Dux his brother; for killing the outlaw with a sword; for going, without permission or preparation, into the Purgatorium of the lake island, where his immortal soul might have been lost; for keeping with him, in spite of all proscriptions, the Crow that had led him astray—for all these things the Brother was sent to the home Abbey of his order, which stood on a far sea island, there to live in solitude and penance for the space of five years.
High on the stone cliffs of that island’s western edge, on the flat stone shelf before his little cell, which looked like a large bee skep but was made of piled stones, the Brother sat chewing a fish-spine with a little goodness left on it and looking down at the beach below, where the waves crashed against the vast blocks of stone and were dissipated, over and over.
“I hate it here,” he said to Dar Oakley. He placed the fish bone before the Crow, who regarded it without joy.
After the hanging of the Wolves gang, when Dar Oakley’d found himself in bad repute with the Crows of that demesne, he decided that beginning again elsewhere might be easier if he followed the Brother, who would at least feed him if he was able. He could have had no conception of what awaited him.
The sea was terrifying. Even after he had snuck aboard the boat that carried the Brother to this island and put out, he couldn’t admit to himself that such a thing as the sea could exist. The blue-black waves topped with white fangs were like no water he’d ever seen, the vicious slap of them on the little boat’s flanks, their salt spittle, the creak of the oars in their locks and the groaning of the frame as though all of it suffered continuously—none of that was as bad as knowing that he was too far from land to return: there were no resting places for a Crow on the sea.