Still he couldn’t tell whether the tales of the Terns made the world seem larger, or actually smaller. The world’s ends were so far apart that the thought of it caused a hole to open in his heart if he thought of it incautiously. Yet the same stories made the world a world; it had ends; these little birds crossed it, laughing as though it were easy.
Meantime, down on the sands of the long beach that ran below shattered rocks, Dar Oakley saw the Brother often, sitting with the ones who went out in boats to the sea to catch fish, unsuited as People were to that business. The Brother had been consigned to silence, but he seemed to have forgotten that: he talked as much as he listened, making sweeps of his arms toward the sea, or holding them apart as though they held something huge. Dar Oakley could see his jaw wagging. It had always cost the man: talking and not listening.
Another morning, coming from the Terns’ cliff side with his head full of the Terns’ tales, he saw the Brother helped aboard one of the People boats and carried out to sea: the oarsmen pulling at the slender oars, the boat lifted almost upright on the surf and then riding low and purposefully on the calmer waters farther out. Dar Oakley wondered if he’d come back—if he wanted to, if he would be able to.
But there he was at sunset toiling up the path to his cell, a string of fish and a grin on his face. The bald strip on his head was fiercely red from the sun.
“Corve,” he called, waving. “Signs and wonders. Come eat.”
The Saints had a plot of ground where they had planted beans in rows—there was so little soil on this rocky land that the People of the island had long ago made soil for the Saints from beach sand mixed with seaweed. So there were beans and fish to eat, and cresses that grew along a little stream that issued from the well where they got their water. A fire pit where they cooked when it didn’t rain, which wasn’t often.
“There are lands to the West, Corve,” the Brother said. “The fishermen know it, though few have ever reached them.”
“Yes,” Dar Oakley said. “Great lands, billwise and darkwise. North and West.”
“Yes.” The Brother stirred fish-guts and meal to cook for the Crow, and laid his own fish on the hot stones. “Some say that the sea goes on forever, or to the world’s edge. No.”
“No,” said Dar Oakley. “A few days’ flight billwise there is land. Islands, one after another, like this one. Or different.”
“The Isles of the Blessed lie that way,” the Brother said, gesturing to where the declining sun hid behind clouds. “A land promised to the Saints, where no one dies.”
“A land where the sun never sets, or never rises.”
“A great Dux went that way. He went in a three-hide boat with a cohort to row. He came to islands where there is no death.”
“Lands made of ice that never melts away,” Dar Oakley said. “Summer is warm there but the ice remains. There they make their nests and raise young.”
As though just then realizing that the Crow had all this time been speaking to him, the Brother said, “Who does?”
“The Terns,” Dar Oakley said. “The Terns with the sharp red beaks.”
The Brother considered this, eyes looking inward as though trying to remember ever seeing such a bird.
Perhaps attracted by the smell of the frying fish, one of the other Saints came forth, the large, long-armed one whom Dar Oakley had been told was a female, though it was hard to see that—she was beardless and wore the same robe as the others, but her hair, though cropped short, wasn’t shaved across her head. She sat without speaking, and the Brother gave her half a fish on a flat stone.
“This Dux,” he said. “He traveled many days, perhaps it was months. He saw an island of giant Ants, and an island where great Horses ran a race forever. Fierce seabirds attacked his company, but they were fought off. They saw a great demon riding in a carriage over the surface of the sea, as easily as you might across a field.”
“Bran,” said the female Saint. “It was Bran who went that way.”
“He came to a land of Joy,” the Brother said. “Where everyone laughed all the time. A land of Grief, where they never ceased weeping.”
“Or maybe it was someone else,” said the female Saint.
Since the Terns had told him of none of those islands, Dar Oakley kept silent. The other Saint, a long, lean one, had come up and now stood motionless, listening.
“Then he came to an island,” the Brother went on. “It was always spring there. Great fruits grew on every tree. The sun never set, springs of sweet water never failed. Women and boys of great beauty sang God’s praises all the endless day.”
“Yma,” said the third Saint. “The Isle of the Blessed.” The ball in his throat—his gizzard, Dar Oakley thought of it, though it was a different thing—wobbled. The Brother had told him that this Saint came from the land over the short sea to the East of this island, where the People suffered greatly from sadness and longing.
“Paradise,” said the female Saint. Her beardless chin was greasy with fish. “The good souls go there. The innocent, who never sinned.”
“But this Dux,” the Brother said, “went there alive as you and me.”
“You can’t,” the female Saint said. “In no boat of this world.”
It had begun softly to rain.
“Listen,” the Brother said, and tapped his breast. “I went down in this flesh into the land of the damned souls. In this flesh I will go West to the land promised to the Saints, and see it too.”
The female Saint snorted, and arose, drawing her hood over her head. The other Saint seemed reluctant to leave, squatting by the fire where fats and raindrops sizzled. But after looking long out to the cloud-occluded West, he too went away.
In his dank cell the Brother wrapped himself in his sole possession, an ancient, mangy robe of Wolf-skin that his brother the Dux had given to him. Dar Oakley found the sight of the fur moving in the darkness of the cell unsettling.
“That Dux returned over the sea to his own land,” the Brother said, seeming near sleep, “and when his boat neared the shore, one of his companions, homesick, leapt from the boat and swam to land. But when he climbed out onto the sands, his body crumbled all to dust and bone, as though it had lain there a hundred years. The Dux called from the boat, telling them who he was, and where he had gone. None of them remembered him or his name, but they said that long, long before, a great Dux then living thereabouts was said to have set out on such a journey, and never returned.”
Dar Oakley in the little window said nothing.
“Yet that was he, the same man who had gone out.”
“Would that happen to you,” Dar Oakley asked, “if you went out that far and returned? Crumble into dust?”
“I wouldn’t return,” the Brother said. “Not ever.”
They were still for a time. The clouds broke and began to part.
“Corve,” the Brother said. “How do the Terns know how to cross the sea?”
“They know. They go—” Now which word was the People word for billwise? “They go North,” he said. “And . . . West.”
“How do they know these ways? Do they study the stars, or . . .”
“They know,” Dar Oakley said. “It’s clear. I know.”
“You do? Always?”
“Yes.”
The Brother said no more then. But the Wolf-skin heaved like a big beast, and heaved again. The Brother murmured his long prayers, and listening, Dar Oakley fell asleep.
For a long time thereafter the Brother and the others talked about a journey to the West and the land promised to the Saints, but only as though to determine if it was right or wrong to go there, or even to hope to go there; whether such a land could be, whether God would permit such lands to exist at all, and if they did exist, who might inhabit them, and in what state, in the body or not, exalted or not.