He rose. What a story to tell other Crows, if he ever again met any.
I don’t know, no one now can know, if the boat of the Saints and its cohort reached the continent across the western sea; if it returned to where it started, or if it only went on sailing, and still sails, ever deeper into Ymr.
But of course one or another of them must have returned, or the story wouldn’t have gone on being told, and it has been; it was still being told five hundred years on, when it was first written down: the story of a voyage undertaken in a hide boat by Saints.
But suppose it wasn’t one of the Saints who returned, or one of the fisher People; suppose it was the kitchen-boy, who knew how to rig a sail, who had named himself Branan, Little Bran. Alone and near dead, in the dismasted and oarless boat, after being blown clinging to the wonderful tiller for who knows how long by the prevailing westerlies, back to the islands of before.
He feels a change in the sea; a smell awakens him. He struggles to rise from where he lies in the bottom of the boat and sees a shore, like the shore he once knew. A rising tide carries the little craft over the bar and into the cove. There it bobs for a time until fisher People catch sight of it and put out to see what it might be. They hail it—from afar, being suspicious folk. The kitchen-boy calls to them as best he can: Is this the island of the Gray Abbey and the Brothers in white?
Yes, they answer. And who are you?
I am he who set out with the Saints for the Isles of the Blessed, and how many centuries have passed since then?
No centuries, they’d tell him, a few years only, three or five, no more.
I’m afraid to come ashore, he’d call. When I touch earth, I will fall and crumble into grave-dust, as one dead for a hundred years.
Don’t be a fool, they shout to him. Come ashore with us, and tell us what became of you, and of the Saints.
And he’d come, and not crumble into grave-dust when his foot touched the shore.
He could have lived long there too, and perhaps become a Brother in the Abbey in whose kitchen he had served, telling and retelling his tale, which would go on being retold (and changed, and added to) after he was dead.
And it would be told how after they sailed west from the last island of the known world, the eight of them came upon a Mermaid in the middle of the sea, and watched her white breast rise and fall softly in sleep. How after that they reached the fiery Island of the Smiths, and heard the beings there cry, Woe! Woe! as they in the boat came near. Black hairy men came to the shore and shook fists at them, and one brought a burning mass of Hell-stuff in a tongs and flung it at them, but by God’s grace it fell short, and made a great steam and noise in the sea.
Then how the twelve of them came to a crystal mountain in the sea. It was as cold as the black mountain was hot, and Brother Bran said it was a way up to heaven, just as the other was an outcrop of Hell. They found crystal Mass-vessels floating in the water there, and gathered them up, but soon they all melted away as though they had not been.
It would be told how the twenty companions once pitched their camp on the back of a great Whale, thinking it was an island, and even lit a fire there, which caused the Whale to sink down into the sea, and them with it, which nearly drowned them all!
And the Paradise of the Birds, in the farthest North, where uncountable numbers of white birds sang more sweetly than the Swans of Llyr, and had human faces: they were souls neither damned nor saved, awaiting Judgment Day.
And the Fortunate Isles, where sin had never been, and maidens in silver raiment brought them golden apples out of Eden to eat and sustain them in their voyage. There Bridget the female Saint remained and perhaps still remains.
The thirty of them then crossed a sea turbid and thick as stew, and passed through a fog into another sea transparent as air and still as glass, and they could look a league or more downward within to see fabulous creatures swimming. Beyond that they came to the Land they sought; but what land it was, whether time passed there or didn’t, if there were food and drink there or birds and beasts, and of what kind; if fresh springs there washed away memories of home; if there were swords and battles, or only prayer and praising God, the kitchen-boy couldn’t say, because before he could disembark he heard a Voice calling from shore, saying he was forbidden to enter that land until his life was ended. And after a long wait alone as the sun rose and set, the Boy Bran, Branan, turned the boat toward the rising sun and home.
If anything like that happened, if such stories as those were remembered and added to over many years, it could be that the name that the kitchen-boy had chosen for himself later got conflated with the name of great Brendan, Saint and sailor, who lived (I’d guess) a hundred years on. And so when now we read of the events in the account of Brendan’s miraculous Navigatio, first written down centuries after that and circulated through Christendom in many copies, maybe we can glimpse the little currach of the three Saints far out on the deep sea.
In none of those tales is there any mention of a Crow carried on the boat’s prow or the yardarm over empty sea, lifting his wings now and then for balance, turning his head this way and that toward the unchanging West; and his account—how he, at least, did cross the River Ocean to the other side—was never part of the tales.
He kept up with the migrating Terns well for a time, whether buoyed by their training and their knowledge or just by his own hope—well, he tried not to think about that, and now and then when he let himself look down at the dark or shining sea far below, he’d feel the heart within him faint.
Then Terns became fewer; he was alone. Which meant nothing in a practical way; either he could keep himself aloft and bent to the West or he couldn’t. When his eyes were open, he saw only sea and sky; also when they closed. He began to sleep on the wing, something he hadn’t thought was possible for him, though the Terns said they did it, oh many seabirds do, they do.
After a length of nights and days—how many he doesn’t know—there came a change in the air, something vast moving over the sea: it was that fearsome thing that from the shore of the land of ice he had perceived lying in the distance and the future. And the first sign of it was that he saw the Terns returning. A daywise wind seemed to be bowling them along, one then two then three, going back the way they had come. Too far off to make any sign to him, so light they couldn’t resist the wind’s pressing. Through the day the thing grew stronger; the air became thick and warm, the wind greater. His flying was no longer flying; he was a captive thing, plucked up and swept along faster than his wings could beat; he’d been seized on the fly as by an Eagle, and carried off. The Terns were all gone, he couldn’t see any; he couldn’t see anything at all.
“I thought they’d deserted me,” Dar Oakley told me. “That they knew something they couldn’t tell me, to flee somehow. What became of them, where they went, I don’t know. After a time the wind suddenly ceased, as though a big running beast had died, and I was alone in air like no air I’ve ever been in. Heavy air, you can sense it, air too heavy to breathe. I flew and flew and seemed not to move at all, as though a circling wind that I couldn’t feel turned and turned me in the same place. But always I knew I was moving, moving far fast. The whole dead air I hung in was moving one way. Once I saw a sea-being near me, one with many snaky arms, dead, flying like the demons who hunted that Brother, and turning as I turned. Then somehow it fell away. But if I was flying and he wasn’t, how could he have stayed by me?”