At that he looked up and around my house, as though some answer lay in the vicinity; it’s a way Crows think, as a human might rub his chin. Then he said, “It was strange to me, it was nowhere I’d have thought could be, I was blind and deaf sometimes, I flew upside down in rain, this beast went by. But whatever it was, wherever I was, I knew this: I was not in Ymr. The air in my throat and the sense of my eyes told me so. And if I was in this world and not in that, I was going to die.”
Why if it wasn’t Ymr?
“In those lands of Ymr,” he said, “nothing is mortal. They say it’s where the dead are, but really the ones there aren’t dead and never die. I wasn’t there but here. And so I knew I would die, and really die.”
I’ve tried to understand where he was, and I think that this is what happened: the Terns, and Dar Oakley following on, encountered a massive circular storm, an autumn hurricane or a nor’easter, moving up our coast in a great turning spiral. It may be that the Terns were caught in one spinning arm of it and were thrown outward, past Dar Oakley coming in, and they went on, pushed like leaves by the forward edge of the wind till they escaped, or didn’t. But Dar Oakley was drawn somehow deeper in, into the eye, where the rising air from the sea below kept him aloft. He felt the barometric pressure drop oppressively—I’ve learned that many birds can sense it. And there he was stuck, with other matter drawn up, lightning, salt rain falling upward. When at last he was flung out or fell out, battered nearly to death, he was far from the sea; he looked down, and through wild rainy air, he saw land.
The Land Promised to the Saints. It must be, for never in that tumult had he lost his sense of the four ways, and no matter how often he’d been turned around, he knew he’d been moving west with the storm. He was now on the sea’s far side, where the Brother said there was no death.
No death for Saints.
He fell more than flew to ground, unable to wing any longer, his plumage soaked through, starving and ragged, down through gesturing trees greater and more numerous than any trees he’d ever seen in Ka. He was sure he’d collide with a branch of one of these trees, so close-grown he would never pass safely through. Somehow he did pass unstuck, but also unable to catch hold of any branch and cling on.
He lay on earth. The leaves of the trees were impossible colors, orange and gold and red, torn and flung up by the wind like little brilliant birds. He can’t know how long he lay—he hardly knew he was there in life. He couldn’t escape if predators came near. Were there Foxes in paradise?
He looked upward.
On a low branch of a tree of red and orange leaves, a bird sat regarding him. A black bird: a Crow. He knew it for certain, even though this Crow was unlike the Crows where he had been born or the hooded Crows of the islands. It was large, deep glossy black, and heavy-billed. A Raven? No, not. He knew it for a Crow. The last thing he knew.
“Kits,” he said. Not a call, only a name. Then he died.
PART 3
DAR OAKLEY IN THE NEW WORLD
CHAPTER ONE
It wasn’t so bad, Dar Oakley thought, having the Beaver for a wife. She swept the lodge and chased the vermin from the rugs and cooked the corn and peppers. When offspring appeared—a Fox kit, a Gosling—she taught them well, and their Beaver uncles approved.
The Beaver had first set out to claim the Crow for a husband when she saw him high up in a dead Pine, his bill pointed sunset-wise, still and attentive.
“What do you see, Crow?” she called to him.
“I see nothing,” the Crow answered.
That seemed pretty remarkable to the Beaver—the Crow’s eyes were so good he could see anything—he could even see nothing if he tried.
“Is that all you see?” the Beaver asked.
“I see trees and fallen trees,” the Crow said. “I see far mountains. I see sky and clouds. I see . . . nothing.”
“So you do see nothing!” the Beaver cried.
The Beaver’s hearing was sharp, and so was her nose, but she couldn’t see much better than a Mole. She thought it would be good if the Crow could be with her—he’d see enemies far off, and the Beavers could take to the water even before the lookouts spanked the water with their tails. A being who could see nothing at all could see anything.
It was hard for a Beaver to woo a Crow—the bird had no taste for the Beaver’s favorite food, sweet young sprouts of poplar and aspen, stripped to the white or in their tender bark. But sometimes love makes love all by itself. The Crow, at ease in the Beaver’s damp lodge, pondered this truth, and how strange it was to know that it was true.
That night the Crow had a dream. He dreamed that somewhere there was a thing that, if you had it, you would never die. You would live longer than the greatest trees, longer than the mountains; you would live until the First Beings returned and began the world again. And this thing was meant for the Crow, if he could find it.
But the secret was that the thing couldn’t be sought because it couldn’t be seen or grasped; it had no shape, no size, no corners or holes or bumps, no skin or bones, no outside and no inside, no taste or smell. It wasn’t different from nothing at all.
When day came the Beaver asked him what the dream was that had troubled him in the night. The Crow didn’t want to tell her, because he didn’t want any other being to find the thing before he could think of a way to get it for himself. So he said, “I dreamed of nothing, Wife.”
“Nothing!” said the Beaver. “Was it just like what you saw from high up in the dead Pine long ago?”
“It was nothing at all,” the Crow said. “Where is my breakfast?”
“Husband,” the Beaver said, “if you dream of a thing, it means you should have it. The spirits will help you find it. Your clan and your family must help you get it.”
“I dreamed of nothing!” the Crow cried.
“Then Nothing is what you’ll get,” said the Beaver. “I will help.”
She smiled and showed her great orange teeth. The Fox kit and the Gosling tittered at their parents’ argument, and the Beaver uncles awoke and blinked. The Crow pulled in his head and waited for the hilarity to pass.
The Beaver said, “Old Turtle is the wisest being. He will know everything there is to know about nothing. We’ll go find him.”
The Gosling laughed; the Fox kit laughed so hard he nearly rolled into the fire. “Watch out!” the Fire said.
“I’ll go pack,” said the Beaver. “It’s a long journey.”
“No!” the Crow said. His stupid wife! But sometimes love and simplicity know more than wit and cunning. . . .
At that Dar Oakley’d had enough; he could stand no more of this story. Ka, he cried aloud in exasperation, and flew up a limb or two higher in the tree he occupied. The People storyteller, whose name was One Ear, pointed to him, smiling, and his hearers looked and laughed: it was funny to have a being who was in the story listening to it being told. The storyteller hadn’t given the Crow in the story a name—Crow was all he said, and that bird listening was a Crow, and any Crow is every Crow.
Well, Dar Oakley knew otherwise. The story was about him and not any other Crow or all Crows. He knew that because the storyteller had got it from him, and then for his People hearers he had turned it into a story like all his others, though Dar Oakley was pretty sure that in fact the storyteller knew better, knew that the Crow Dar Oakley had a name and nature all his own, just as each of the People gathered here around him did.