Of course they had each made a vow not to talk at all about anything, except at need. But they did. And talking felt itself like a voyage.
“If,” the Brother posited, tapping the finger of one hand into the palm of the other, “if we are meant for heaven, why should we have to pass through death to reach it? Don’t we want to enter into that place without going down into the grave? For great Austin said: it’s what all men want, and what the soul wants too.”
“Christ died,” the female Saint answered. “And went down into Hell, and returned to earth and life again.”
“Which is to say,” the Brother said, “you may go down into the darkness and suffer the pains of Hell, and come back from there in this flesh alive. So why may we not go to paradise in this body, and come back alive? Why would God not want that for us if we can gain it? He made that land as he made all things. Not to keep it from us.”
“This,” the third Saint let them know, “was asserted by a great theologus of my own country: God will save all men, and wishes to. But his opinion has been condemned.”
The female Saint said, “We are here on earth, all of us, to ready ourselves for death. So that it doesn’t come upon us when we are still in sin, our penances uncompleted.”
“Not me,” the third Saint said.
“So then,” the Brother responded, “if those lands could be found when the soul is still in the body, death couldn’t take you unawares. For once there, you—I mean a person, whatever person—wouldn’t die. If the tales are true.”
The female Saint argued that when the person returned, there would still be death and the penance awaiting.
“But,” the skinny Saint would say, “if all that’s so, then once we—once a person—got there alive, to Isle Yma, so called in our tongue, would he want to come back at all?”
And at that the Brother sat back, hands on his knees, and smiled on them, as though they had learned a lesson, or got the point of a story.
Dar Oakley, who neither wanted to go there nor believed he could return, thought of asking whether there were any Crows in that place, or those places; but he supposed he knew the answer. If a Crow could be there, it wouldn’t be the place they spoke of and hoped for. His presence, the presence of a single Crow, could spoil it all.
Death-bird. Memento mori, the Brother sometimes called him, words of the other, the special language. But it was they, People, who concerned themselves with death. All a Crow wanted was to live: wanted it in so deep a part of him it couldn’t be found or named or spoken.
Provisions at the place of the three beehive cells grew so scarce in winter that Dar Oakley’d become a seabird. He couldn’t dive like the Terns or chase the receding waves like the Sandpipers; he didn’t join the crowds of Gulls who harried the People boats as they came in at evening, pecking at the catch and shrieking at one another; but he took his turn at the guts and the sea-flesh the fishers didn’t want and flung on the sand. The Gulls by now paid him no attention, seemed not to notice him, or yelled at him only as much as they did at their own kind.
The fisher People would draw up their boats on the broad beach of a sheltered cove, turn them over onto piles of flat stones, to keep them dry; go over them with care, heal the wounds in their hides with hooked needles and gut, spread old butter and seal fat over the lapped seams to keep out water. New boats were made here as well, of wood and hides. Dar Oakley kept watch on one being built down the cove well up from the waterline, a boat of a kind—though Dar Oakley couldn’t know it—that hadn’t been built before on this island, where every boat was the same as every other.
He could see that it was going to be large, very large. A big crowd of People was at work on it, coming and going through the days with long wicker staves and stiff cowhides tanned with oak-bark and other things necessary. The Saints came to watch over them, and on the White Stone days the Brother fed them with bits of white bread where they knelt on the sand, putting the morsels into their open mouths like a mother bird feeding young. No work was done on the boat on those days; the Saints and the fishers told tales, and drew figures with sticks on the smooth sand, and pointed this way and that out to sea.
The Brother’s plan was getting into the heads of others, more every day, old and young.
The great boat was being built with its bottom upward. The bar that ran around the boat’s edge, which the fishers would grip when at sea, was laid down first, making a shape tapering toward the front. The arches of the ribs were raised over this frame and fastened to it in a way that Dar Oakley couldn’t perceive. That took many days. The growing boat resembled a collapsed Whale’s skeleton, except that instead of falling in, it was growing up as more ribs were stuck on. Then when the skeleton was complete its skin was put on, in about the time it would take for a dead Whale’s to fall away. That was the cowhides they laid over it, and then treated to keep water out: giving it by hand what the Terns and Gulls were born with.
There was a skinny boy who had been taken as a slave by coastal raiders, was ransomed by the Brothers of the Abbey, and now served them in the kitchens—Dar Oakley never learned his name. He had spent his growing-up on boats and galleys, and of all the island People he was readiest to be off with the Saints to lands that weren’t this one, or at least to go to sea and not come back. When the boat was done to the islanders’ standards, he protested, No, no, no, to go far it would have to be like the boats he’d known, which he’d helped to build, that flew over the sea’s hills and valleys faster than any of theirs; and he danced and spoke in their tongue as best he could and made things of sticks that would show the head shakers and laughers what to do. But the Saints knew what he meant: a naviculam, a barca, a navis longa. They were shown in books.
So that was how the Boat of the Saints got a mast stepped amidships with a square sail hung from a yardarm and handled with ropes rigged port and starboard. And a stern-mounted rudder with a long tiller arm to turn the ship—for now it was a ship—into the way it must go: all carved from precious oak and bound in iron and blessed many times.
The winter was passing, the prevailing winds shifting: Dar Oakley, seabird, felt it. By the time the great boat was finished, the Terns were beginning to leave for the lands of ice and warmth. A kind of fever or passion had come over them, and Dar Oakley found it hard to get their attention. He wondered if what they felt now was like what Crows feel when a winter roost breaks up in spring and the families depart to build nests again and make more Crows—but it must be different, for these birds went from summer to spring to summer.
Yes, yes, yes, they cried to him, yes, we go.
He asked them, Is there really a big land to darkwise, far, far off? Not only sea islands?
Oh yes, big lands, lands with no sea beyond them, we don’t go look but we know. Terns say so.
And the islands that lie that way, Dar Oakley said. Is there one of giant Ants? Is there one where Horses run without stopping?
What is Ant? they shouted, laughing. What is Horse?
They knew nothing of the earth or its beasts, and cared nothing for it but that it bordered the sea, as a Crow cares nothing for the sea but that it borders the earth.