But they had said it: land to the West. He couldn’t ask them if springs never failed there, or if the trees bore fruit all the time and their leaves never turned and felclass="underline" they’d know nothing of such things.
If People wanted to go there, he asked them, to the great lands darkwise, how would they go?
How the winds go! Billwise, billwise! Island to island. Cross the waters between, rest there, go again! Cross the long sea billwise-darkwise! Reach that land.
They can’t, Dar Oakley said. They don’t know which way it is. Only if they can see sun or stars and guess.
The Terns found that so hilarious their cries drowned out Dar Oakley’s questions, and most of them went away, having got their laughs. But a few remained.
Could you guide them, though? Dar Oakley asked. If they could follow you—I suppose you’d get nothing out of it, but—
How can we? one said, one of those who’d chased the Skua that chased Dar Oakley. We fly high, high over the long sea. How can we see them? Little specks down on the water, how tell one from another?
Well, Dar Oakley said.
You, cried the Tern. You, you, you we know. When we see you flying? We come help!
The bird lifted off the rock and mimed the scene: Fly, look down, cry out Ah!, come down.
We come! said another. Maybe we come.
We look, look, look out for you! Crow of your kind, only one of you! We will see you later! Good-bye!
He watched them go off from the sea-cliff, one’s departure lifting the next and the next out over the water. He seemed to see the Saints far away on the same water, clinging to their boat, in danger of death and failure.
On the beach People stood around the great boat, not at work, waiting, as though for the thing to move on its own.
He would have to go with them, that was all. Billwise-darkwise against the winds, to the land that he could likely never enter, just so that the Saints wouldn’t die before they got there and all go down into the Down forever.
Myself, I thought—and I told Dar Oakley this—that he had to go with them because he had once stolen from People the thing the Saints were really going in search of: endless life, the Most Precious Thing. It had been theirs, not his, and though he’d lost it, he kept it still; he couldn’t shed it, nor give it away. But perhaps it could be found again.
He told me no, that wasn’t it; he said that if he told it that way, it would seem he knew more of his story, and of himself, than he did. All he knew then was that he must go.
The Brother, of course, had assumed all along that Dar Oakley would go with him. The Brother believed that Dar Oakley was his.
So they stood on the edge of the River Ocean and looked toward the far bank, which no one they knew had ever seen or stepped upon. Morning had risen, but the West into which they would go was still dark. Their boat lay up on the sands, and all the stores and goods, the leather bags of water and milk, the furnishings for Mass, the smoked fish, the blessed crucifixes, the Saints’ relics, the woolens and furs, were piled up by it to be put in.
When they had prayed, they all chose new names to go out with on the sea.
“I’ll be Bridget,” the female Saint said.
“I’ll be Bran,” said the Brother, and struck his breast, as though to put the new name into his heart.
“I will be Dylan,” said the third Saint with a little sob. “Powerful in swimming, lord of the sea.”
“I will be Bran too,” said the kitchen-boy, and he balled his fists and stuck out his chin; but he wasn’t allowed. They let him be Little Bran, Branan.
Dar Oakley was given no name; he had never told his name to the Brother. (I suppose no one on that day said that in the language of the sea-island People, Bran means Raven, a bird that many of the People believed Dar Oakley to be.) The four fisher People who had elected to go with the Saints kept their names, or at least never spoke up to change them.
When all that was done and the stores readied, the boat had to be brought to the water. Four fisher People could carry a little boat to water by crawling beneath it and lifting it by the gunwales onto their backs; seeing them stumble down the beach had made Dar Oakley think of a dark, many-legged sea-beast. But the new boat couldn’t be carried that way; it was too large and long. So all the People, male, female, child, picked up the boat with their hands under the gunwales and all lifted and carried it together to the water.
Turning the big boat upright without losing it on the water or holing the bottom on the shingle took some labor and scolding. When it was right side up (Dar Oakley marveling again, always, at the cleverness of People with their things, how they thought it all out, what would happen if it were done this way, or that way, how to make the ends they envisioned come to be the ends they got), the fisher People and the kitchen-boy stepped the mast and fixed the yardarm and the tied-up sail and put the tiller in the notch made for it and secured it. The others waded to the boat with supplies and stowed them, what should be near at hand, what could lie down deeper. Day was full. On the sands and on the headland above, more People had assembled to see the beginning of this voyage that they couldn’t know the end of. Dar Oakley watched them point and talk and shake their heads side to side as People did when puzzled or doubtful.
Lastly, the Saints boarded and the oars were put in the oarlocks; Dar Oakley was taken aboard, borne on Brother Bran’s fist like a Dux’s Hawk, and set like a figurehead on the prow. His part was to point them to the islands of the North, and when those islands were passed, over the empty sea to the West.
All the People had come down onto the beach, and many waded into the water to push the heavy-laden boat out to sea. Feeling the sudden free rise and fall of it, his heart cold with fear, Dar Oakley made the call Ka, and the Saints called too, and the People, already falling behind, cheered. Ka, Dar Oakley cried, thrashing his wings mightily: a challenge flung into far Ymr, where anything might be.
It’s an ancient tale, an old possibility, or impossibility. Not so far away from where I now live are the dim remains of stone structures that are said to resemble similar ones on the other shore. Tablets marked with what might be runes that no People who later came here knew or used. Why do we wish it might be so? Do I wish it were so? If I do, it’s only because those Saints, if they really did come, went back again having done no harm; and so the People of this land were left alone till another thousand years had passed. Only one member of the party that set out that day came and stayed, and he’s still here as I write. Just now he’s regarding the day out my window, after a breakfast of spoiled liver. He is that one and he is not that one, and of course his stories are also only stories. And actually he can’t tell me if the Saints and the Companions ever made it even this far.
They sailed first toward islands that the People had long been able to reach: where fish could be caught in good weather, where small settlements had long ago been built. The Brother warned them that all those on such islands would be pagans (Dar Oakley didn’t know what variant of People this word described), but as they came near one tiny island they heard a bell rung; and when they found an inlet where the boat could be run in, they saw far-off a Brother in white. But on seeing them, this Brother went away up the rocks and out of sight, and the voyagers were disappointed. They spent the night in the boat. In the morning Dar Oakley was sent out over the island to see if he could find a church and dwellings, but when he returned, the Brother couldn’t understand his report. The fisher People observing their exchange said nothing, but it was clear they thought the Crow was either a lying demon or just a bird.