The Brother had once told him: the sea is the water round about the land. Even so Dar Oakley had believed that the land was large and the water was little. But it was the other way. From atop the Brother’s cell on the heights he could look over almost all of the Abbey island; but the sea lying all around went daywise to far shores dim as clouds, and darkwise as far as darkwise goes.
“I will die here before I have done all of my penance,” the Brother said. “And if I do die unshriven, what then? Damnation.”
Dar Oakley did not respond to this, having heard it before, many times. “Someone’s coming,” he said.
A figure with a staff and a bag was toiling over the rocks up toward the Brother’s cell, which was one among three nearly identical cells each facing away from the others. Inside each a Saint prayed and brooded. If they could avoid it, none of the three of them came out when either of the others was out. This visitor could be coming up to any one of them, to lay an offering of dried fish or meat, a loaf, some apples, at the door, and take away a blessing; but the Brother was the most popular of the Saints there, because of the tale he had to tell of the land underground, which grew more circumstantial the more he told it.
“Now she’s stumbled,” Dar Oakley reported, but the Brother didn’t turn to look. It was one of the bad days of his long penance. On some bad days he howled aloud in shame and boredom. “Ah, she’s up again now and coming along.”
With a wing beat he ascended away. Though he featured in the story the Brother told and retold, he knew that his actual presence nearby would be unsettling to visitors. Beneath him as he rose, turning, he could observe one Saint coming out of his cell, only to go immediately back in when the old woman appeared on the rocky track; and the Brother, retreating into his cell to await or avoid her; and the third Saint sitting oblivious on the cliff’s edge, face to the sky.
One Crow alone is no Crows: Dar Oakley was more alone here than the Saints were in their cells. In the island’s interior there were Jackdaws, and there were birds like Crows, who spoke a language Dar Oakley partly understood, and who lived like Crows—but rather than being solidly black, as he was, they were covered on backs and heads with pale-gray plumage. They looked to Dar Oakley like Crows wearing the hooded robes of Brothers. They showed no interest in him, didn’t respond to his calls. Heart-hurt—though he pretended to himself he didn’t care—he went away to where those hooded Crows didn’t usually go: the bare cliffs above the sea.
There were red-billed black birds nesting on the cliffs that might have been Jackdaws of a kind, playing games (he thought) on the fast-moving air. He saw now and then a few pairs of Ravens, flying high in their courtships, unconcerned with others—where they found provender he couldn’t ever learn.
A few People, too, lived by the sea. He’d observed them making their way down the cliffs to the beaches with care, always the chance of a loose stone or a misstep that would bring them tumbling over the sharp rocks; saw the timid young ones creep on their bellies to the edge of a high cliff, put their heads out and look over into the fearful height, in no danger at all of falling but clinging anyway to the turf as though to hold themselves on. He saw People let down on thick hairy ropes from the cliff-top to the ledges, where they gathered eggs or killed birds—sometimes such a one lost his foothold and was left spinning helplessly in air at the rope’s end and looking down.
But the rock-pools and the sea-winds were filled with birds, birds of kinds he’d never seen before, living in ways he couldn’t have imagined. He’d never had much interest in birds not his own kind—Crows do not. He had knowledge of the long-winged predators who had an interest in him; he knew when small birds laid eggs and hatched chicks—there was reason to know. Birds nameless to him had always been hidden in the trees around him; he’d heard their morning and evening chatter. Some were gone in winter, he didn’t know where, and returned from there in spring. He hadn’t pondered them.
These multitudes, though, he’d taken to studying. There wasn’t much else to do.
He loved how the gray-white shriekers, some black-capped, would hang stationary in the wind on their long cupped wings, studying the sea surface, then drop down and dip into the water and come out with a fish. Crows are agile enough, but Dar Oakley couldn’t do that—his wings rose, wanting to try, but he closed them, kept to his perch on the rocks. Black birds with bright-colored heavy bills crowded the rock ledges, so tightly packed together that one coming in to settle knocked off another. Those ones were fishers too. They were all fishers. Out at sea on rocks that lifted their brows above the water (yet sometimes didn’t; Dar Oakley had yet to understand the tides) were long-necked, long-beaked birds that leapt up and dove beneath the water, reappeared with prey, returned to their rocks and stood on long black feet, lifting their heads high for the caught thing to slither down their throats; then they spread their wings, apparently to dry them. Ducks rested placidly on the towering rolls of sea and dabbled as though on a pond. Shorebirds ran after the retreating waves to gobble worms or other food that appeared out of the sand for a moment, then turned to run away on sticklike legs from the next wave rushing up to collapse and sprawl over the sands.
The sea was full of food, if you had the means to get it, which Dar Oakley didn’t. Sometimes the incoming waves, which would never cease to alarm him, would fling onto the beach the bodies of dead fish, or of beasts of the sea as large as Boars, and the ashy-brown seabirds and their like would descend on them, squabbling like Crows, each out for itself—until Dar Oakley got up the courage to hop close and put his bill in, whereupon they’d join together to chase him off. Now and then he’d get a bite, minding his manners and staying at the margins.
And he listened.
Their speech wasn’t his, or like any birds’ he knew. But he began to learn it, and copy it. The pale-gray birds with black caps, the ones he most admired, never squabbled over dead things; they ate only at sea, hovering on wings sharp-angled as a Falcon’s until (like a Falcon) they’d close those wings with delicate precision and plummet toward the water—and into it, with hardly a splash, to emerge in a moment with a silver wriggling something; and again. Their bills were narrow and sharp and bright red. They could spend long times aloft, never tiring, rising and falling on the airs that rose from the cold sea and the sun-heated rocks, and when they gathered on the cliffs, they yakked and shrieked as though laughing together at their own careless prowess. Their words filled him with the same strange pleasure and longing as the Brother’s words for invisible and holy things once had. Now and then one would cast an eye at Dar Oakley on his perch, and take a little notice—he was something they didn’t see always—and he’d beck, and call what to his own ears sounded like their high calclass="underline" but they couldn’t grasp that, or didn’t care to respond.
Some seabirds had a trick that reminded Dar Oakley of the Crows in his former land: they’d take up shellfish (it had been snails where he came from) and drop them from a height on a carefully chosen rock to break the shells and get the wealth. It was a good game, and it required some nice calculation: drop the thing from too low, and it wouldn’t break; drop it from too high and a thief might slip in and get to the tidbit before you could.