Then spring began.
They weren’t yet home, certainly; but wasn’t this earth, old earth, not Death’s nowhere any longer? No, he mustn’t think that way. But it was quickly growing hard for him to think at all. In any spring it’s so, and in this spring more than in any other. What Crow had ever fought as hard for a mate as he had for Na Cherry? There were Crows who thought, Well, spring’s spring, a mate’s a mate: but Dar Oakley knew that some springs are more spring than others. Those when new mates are won. Those when lost mates are found.
Couldn’t she feel it?
She said yes. But he didn’t know.
“Let’s fly on,” he said.
He awoke next dawn feeling twice the size he’d been the night before, greedy, fierce, strong. Her sweet indifference only made him more so.
They went to forage, walking together.
“Na Cherry,” he said, coming close, head low.
Yes, she said.
There are long dances on spring mornings and short ones, every Crow knows, but once started they won’t stop. Dar Oakley could think, No, no, but it was as though he heard some other Crow say it, far away.
Did she accede, join in? Lower herself to the ground and lift her tail feathers because she must, or because he covered her? He doesn’t know; he doesn’t know, now, if she was ever really there at all.
Dai, he whispered, and from behind her he lifted her spread tail. Ndai, daya, na.
No, she said.
A black shadow flitted or fled at his darkwise eye, a soft sound of lifting wings—nothing he really saw or heard. Nothing: he was grappling with nothing. He cried out, staggered forward into nothing open-beaked as though he’d dropped something heavy. He was looking billwise down the far long way they’d come to reach this place. Something flitted or fled that way, and then didn’t.
A small, thin voice spoke: Crow.
He jumped forward, turned. The Owl settled soundlessly before him.
I didn’t do it, Dar Oakley said. I didn’t, really. Just almost.
Crow, the Owl said, you are just one day’s flight from home.
No, Dar Oakley cried. No, no. I didn’t do it. I mean, I’m sorry! I didn’t do it and I’m sorry.
I knew it would be this way, the Owl said.
No! Let me go after her, bring her back. I know the way there.
There is no there, Crow. You are a fool. I’ve given help to you for nothing.
It rose up with an awful beating of wings, lifting its huge armed feet to strike. Fool Crow! it cried. Dar Oakley dodged away, but a long curved talon caught his cheek before he could turn. He fell to earth and lay still. He felt the wind of the Owl’s passing.
Remember, he heard the Owl say, already gone.
He lay motionless for a long time, eyes closed. Pretty soon, he knew, beings would come to eat him: it was what he’d do himself, seeing a thing like him lying as he lay.
He wondered if the Owl knew that this was what had to happen. He still wonders about that. He thinks about stories, how if they begin at all, then their ends are set, they can only happen one way; or is that so only with the stories Death tells in Ymr, about the beings there? Maybe such stories are told so that the living will learn, and learn again and again, that they’ll never win anything from that realm.
Well, he could tell it to himself now. The luckiest Crow who ever lived, and he had never won anything from life or death that he could keep.
The grass crackled, daywise, and something snuffled. Dar Oakley kept his eyes tight shut. Fool. Better off dead. Maybe dead he’d find himself again with her, even if he’d never know of it.
He sensed a fur-bearer. Instinct was stronger than resolve. He leapt up with a cry and a thudding of wings, and the being was gone so fast Dar Oakley couldn’t name it.
The hurt that Death had given to Dar Oakley’s cheek healed, but the plumage in that patch grew in white. It’s still white today, and I suppose ever after will be. Over time the journey to the Ymr of Ka grew dim and unreal to him—what he tells me now of it is all that he retains, and even that little he’s unsure of. He thinks there must be more; for one thing, there is no color in any memory he has of it.
He remembers Na Cherry, though. Whether or not Death tricked him into that journey just to teach him a lesson (him and all Crows, though what other Crow ever needed to know it?), he often puzzles over whether it’s worse to know that Na Cherry is somewhere, in a grove at evening, laughing and talking and remembering—or gone altogether, as though she hadn’t been. It’s a People problem that’s now his. And in summer, when the cherries ripen on the trees, he’ll say her name, thinking somehow that she might return with them, if he watches and waits: that he’ll find her eating her fill amid the laden branches.
Meanwhile, of course, the new country that Dar Oakley had promised to the flock kept on coming, even as the Crows stayed where they were. Now and then one or another Crow would stop him to ask about it, that land, When’s it coming, if it is? and he’d just nod wisely and say, Keep your eyes open. And it did come, season by season, closer and closer until they could see (those who still remembered the bargain the flock had made with Dar Oakley) that it was as he had described it, where Death provided, where young endlessly came to be, where things were on the whole good for Crows. They were surprised then to find Dar Oakley also there, him with the white patch on his cheek—unmistakable. And his and Na Cherry’s children, too, and then their children’s children. When they’d question him, he’d take the stance that’s a shrug: Don’t know, it’s just the way things are in that country. To which Dar Oakley now gave a name for them to have, a name that had never existed before in Ka because it was for something that had never before needed a name. I can’t reproduce on the page the sound of it, but if it has an exact translation into our speech, it would be the Future.
That new country would in time also take in the region not-billwise to which in the depths of winter these Crows migrated. They went down there each year by the old ways, which they found were still the same there in the Future, the landmarks the same. But those misty rolling hills of Na Cherry’s old demesne really were different, and for a few winters brought forth wealth never known before to Crows who hadn’t been with Dar Oakley in the Great Dying so many years before. When that land had given way to even more or farther Future, and the sudden riches they’d found there were gone, long-lived Crows would remember it as the Land of Dead Horses.
CHAPTER THREE
A gray day in the winter lands, smell of rain. Crows walking a stubbled field, finding little enough: rotted grains, Bumblebee’s nest, a dead Mouse. But glad anyway to be where snow and ice don’t reach.
One lifts her head. “Thunder?”
“Not now,” Dar Oakley says. “Wrong season.” But now he can hear it too: a long rolling rumble, rising and falling, over daywise from them. Unlike thunder, it doesn’t cease and start again; it’s continuous.
“Weird,” says the Crow, whose name (Dar Oakley thinks) is Toebone.
They return to foraging, each lifting his head now and then to listen, and to smell the air.
“Smoke,” says Toebone.
It is. Not the smell of wood-fire, though; they know that smell.
“Look,” says another Crow. Overhead a crowd of Blackbirds, flying in a confused mass daywise to darkwise, as though tossed by storm winds, though there are none.