There was no reason to stay. They climbed up to where they saw a spring in a cairn of stones, and filled their water-skins, and went on. Green water changed again to blue. Dar Oakley pulled in his head and blinkered his eyes against the salt spray. That island had borne a crown of trees; he’d heard birds. Should he have quit when he had the chance?
They knew, from sailors’ tales passed down and from the Brothers’ books, certain places they would likely come upon on the deep sea. There was an island, no one knew quite where, to which the pagan dead had once been carried on boats handled by living People, who crossed from the western lands with their pale passengers to the isle of the dead in a single night—their boats seemingly empty but sunk almost to the gunwales with unhappy souls, who could be heard wailing as they went. Once, on a starless night, they in the Saints’ boat did for a moment hear something, some sound, come over the faintly glowing sea. Not Dar Oakley, though. Prayers were said.
Also, in a certain place in the sea there lies the enormous sleeping body of a Mermaid who floats forever there. Farther that way, toward the northernmost lands, there is a black mountain island of monstrous Smiths, who keep huge fires burning; and ever and ever they beat their iron and the sparks fly up into the smoky sky.
Dar Oakley remembers the Mermaid, lying still and as white as sea-foam. The People exclaimed and pointed to her, afraid that they might wake her, but when they came close enough, it was clear to them that she wasn’t sleeping but dead, and indeed had been dead for so long that she had turned to stone: her great closed lids and her scaly tail and her breasts, all stone. Dar Oakley, who’s never been able to perceive the likenesses of People that People see everywhere, saw only a long, low, bare white island.
At the island of the Smiths they saw the fires, and the sparks from the forges flung into the smoky air, and they smelled a dreadful smell; hot stones fell from the mountain into the sea and steamed. But they saw no Smiths.
“This is a place thrown up out of Hell,” the Brother said. “I was there, I suffered, I was judged. A thousand thousand damned souls were thrust into that fire.” But they couldn’t see any damned souls, either.
They came in sight of a small white island too bright in the sun even to look at steadily. When they came nearer to it, they saw that it breathed cold breath continuously as though alive, and they wondered if it was a great shapeless beast, like no beast they had ever seen; but when they reached it and pulled in under an overhang of it so close they could touch it, they found it was all made of ice: its breath was cold evaporation. Chunks of ice floated in the sea around their boat. They pulled in several and found them to be sweet water, broke them, and put the pieces in their leather water-skins.
They came into a pod of Whales of huge size. One rose almost underneath them, all covered with warts and scuttling crabs and seaweed, and regarded them with a piggy eye. It blew out its warm breath from its head, which fell on them like a shower of rain.
“Suppose,” the female Saint said, “we were to mistake it for an island, and put ashore there.”
Everyone laughed.
“And suppose we spent the night on its back,” said the other Saint, Dylan. “How would that be?”
“And we lit a fire there!”
They laughed more.
“And the Whale felt the heat in his hide, and sank beneath us, and carried us down under the sea!”
At that the Whale, as though offended at being talked of that way, did sink away; his huge tail lifted and spanked the water and wetted them all. They were silent then, and sorry it was gone, and the sea empty again.
He can tell me now, Dar Oakley can, where they were when they met the Whales, or when any island was reached—or rather he can tell me that he knew where he was: in what direction the Abbey island lay, and the daywise land from which he had come at first with the Brother to that island to do his penance; where the black mountain of fire lay, which way to go to return to where they had come from. But he has no map: no sense of how far they went, how many days or weeks they traveled, how long they spent on this shore or that, what distance they traveled until they came to the Paradise of the Birds.
By then it was midsummer, and as the Terns had promised, the sun didn’t set—or hardly set. It approached the world’s edge slantwise, as though unwilling to dip itself into the dark; and when it slid beneath the sea it soon came out again, and began to climb a long, low loop to its zenith and then to its setting-place again. Darkwise and daywise here weren’t toward night and day: but still Dar Oakley knew where he was.
They had been far from land for an unmeasurable time, alone with the hiss of the water over the hull and the dull snap of the sail. They followed where Dar Oakley pointed, but where he pointed was more like nowhere at all than anywhere he had ever been. The sea was everything and he was nothing. The sea—it couldn’t be so but he felt it to be so—desired his nonexistence; it was like an Owl or a Falcon and meant to destroy him in order to increase itself.
Then before dawn there were birds. The sailors couldn’t see them but Dar Oakley could; he left his place on the yardarm and flew toward the specks he saw here and there against a curdled sky. When he was high enough above the sea he saw more, darting, flitting, like leaves torn from winter trees. A strange hope filled him. More birds, seeming to be gathering toward a space of sea as faceless as any other. He called down to the Companions: Follow!
It was the Terns. Through the day the boat of the Saints passed among them as they dove at the water’s surface and delicately plucked out fish, swallowed and returned or carried their catch away. There were other birds too, but not for Dar Oakley. He called and called, but not even the strange boatful of People seemed to interest them, only the wealth in the water. The fisher People pulled out their dragnet and fished too, laughing and tugging while the Saints pressed their hands together, looked upward, and gave thanks. What care God took of these his creatures, to feed them in the middle of the sea! For how could birds have found this rich place without his guidance?
Over and over through that day and the next Dar Oakley went up, crying out words he knew in the Terns’ language. But the cloud of Terns was too thin, too far-spread—they had made a place here where there was no place, but it was a huge place. He looked up, down, around, thinking he might see one he knew—but had he ever known one, been able to tell one of them from another?
He heard laughter.
He looked up. Terns were above his head, floating effortlessly. They were laughing at him.
One flew down close to him. Crow of your kind! it cried. Are you?
Others came near, stalling and hovering and looking into his face. Crow of your kind! We know of you! Terns, Terns have told, if you see Crow, help, help! Here we are!
They flitted away, apparently expecting him to follow. Other Terns came around him to laugh. Stop flap flapping, Crow of your kind! they said. Rise up, winds go your way! But he beat on, slow and awkward amid their dance; they couldn’t know that Crows can only coast briefly on air. He hoped they wouldn’t grow bored with him and fly away. He coasted, sank, beat, rose.
All this time—Dar Oakley just then became aware of it—he and the boat of the Saints had been drifting apart. The strong current was bearing them one way, the wind above bore him another. Unless he dropped right now and beat toward it with all the strength he had, he’d be left out over the water with nowhere to land. He had to, right now.