At the same time he first smelled the smoke.
While Dar Oakley and Dr. Hergesheimer were doing their strange dance or seduction, Moss’s daughter had picked up the Doctor’s abandoned but still burning cigar in her bill and carried it to the grove of trees, and there taken it to earth near where the Doctor’s black thread ran out, to play with it, have her way with it. The grass there, dry with drought, caught quickly. Almost the last thing on earth Dr. Hergesheimer saw was the smoke rising from the grass, spreading, his beloved Judas Crow hovering in delight over it, the dull fire advancing. He ran that way with a cry of horror, then saw it was too late and turned to run the other way. But now Dar Oakley gave a cry, one cry, all his force and power put into it, a cry no Crow could refuse to answer, and the Crows, led by the Biggers Ke Rainshower, Long Bill, Fa Hawthorn, and a dozen others all calling with all their might, descended on him with more following, Dar Oakley, too, crying, Strike! Strike! Eyes! Eyes! Let One have it! Don’t stop! The Doctor stalled, astonished; he flailed at the attacking birds, who executed their drill flawlessly, close-packed yet never touching, a corps de ballet swirling around their principal. His hat was lost. The noise was terrific. It was no mob; Dar Oakley had taught them well, there was no dodging in and away as at a sleepy Owl. Do harm, do harm! Get One! They got One: they stabbed Dr. Hergesheimer’s ears, they got his eyes, or at least blinded them, though he covered them with his bleeding hands. Maddened with fear he stumbled, roaring and batting at attackers he could no longer see. He had to get away from them, just get away, and for a moment he did break away from them and ran.
But, blinded and disoriented, he ran the wrong way: within the grove, not out.
Dar Oakley had seen the sparkle of strange fire in the grass, creeping steadily as though with a will of its own along the line of string that Dr. Hergesheimer had laid down. He had a moment in the uproar to puzzle over it, snapping and popping like outsize matches going off one after the other. Moss’s daughter was following it along, fascinated, oblivious to everything else, the screaming Crows, the bellowing Doctor. She’d drop close to it, land by it, follow it, ascend again. It was fire in perfection.
The Doctor had given up trying to reach that sparkle; he was lost among the trees, bumping into them, shying from the sound of beating wings, reaching out to fend off Crows, who had mostly ceased to torment him and only sat above him and cursed. The choking smoke of the grass fire had turned that way in the wind; the Doctor stumbled over a root and fell facedown, struggled to rise, guarding his bloody head. Dar Oakley almost felt pity for him, a pity that was altogether unlike Pity, and delicious to feel.
The fuse reached the charges in the hole.
The explosion must have been heard for a mile, but Dar Oakley didn’t hear it, or see it, or feel the blast of it; only for an endless moment—this anyway is what he says—he was up in the open air with Dr. Hergesheimer beside him, the two of them immobile and alone in silence, their two souls bound for different states. Then nothing.
So Dar Oakley got his revenge. His opponent was destroyed, which was what he’d wanted and sought, and which—he had been sure—would be good for Crows. But many Crows had also been blown apart, their fragments mixed with the Doctor’s, perhaps: the daughter of Digs Moss for Snails, certainly, and some number of Dar Oakley’s friends and relations, he couldn’t know which because he was dead, as dead as they were, whichever they were. This had not been foreseen in Dar Oakley’s plan, or what counted for Dar Oakley as a plan. As in many of the great tales of vengeance achieved, Dar Oakley’s vengeance destroyed the avenger as well.
The dynamite that Dr. Hergesheimer had planted under the Beeches by the dry streambed was also revenge, and his too turned back on him. Certainly he killed instantly the Crow he had so long hated, along with a number of other Crows and himself. There were farmers in that long war who used dynamite and claimed a hundred, a thousand dead Crows from a few standard sticks of Dupont Red Cross planted in the right places. Even Crows who’d got used to evading every other mode of attack, every other device for Crow reduction, couldn’t defeat that one. The only problem for the farmers was that when the dynamite had done its work, and the shattered tree limbs and the dead Crows were piled and burned, in the next season there would still be Crows, and in the next season more, until there were just as many as before. My Farmers’ Cyclopedia tells of one farmer who, after setting off dynamite that killed twenty Crows out of a big black flock, was asked if that had discouraged them. Well, he answered, them ones it did.
PART 4
DAR OAKLEY IN THE RUIN OF YMR
CHAPTER ONE
The years when Dar Oakley lived among the city Crows in ignorance of his own history were also the years when the great arrangements of time, space, thought, and activity that he calls Ymr (where what People believe to be so is so, where they live enclosed in their own inventions) began ever more rapidly to fall apart: as though thought alone had kept them in working order, and thought was failing. Over centuries People—some People—had become more and more sure they could do anything, make anything, change anything: and so they could. They had even—too late to stop—changed the earth and the seas and the seasons: changed Time. People knew it and knew that it was their fault, even if they were among the ones who could do nothing about it.
I wonder if Dar Oakley ever understood how a city works. If he was there when the high city center was still supported and fed by the periphery and the far lands beyond, whose products it bought and sold; the traffic on its broad brown river, the hundreds of train tracks that ran in and out, the factories that worked day and night and the People who went into and came out of them like tides. Even if he was there then—not long after he died, decades before I was born—I don’t know if his powers of perception could have grasped it all.
Certainly when he first found himself there, a city dweller, he had been there a long time. It took him a while to understand he hadn’t actually traveled far from where he’d last died, blown apart by Dr. Hergesheimer’s dynamite. Rather the city had moved toward him, or to that place he’d been living, taking over fields and farms and woods and towns all the way out to where Anna Kuhn had once lived: as though like the broad river that divided it, the city could flood at certain seasons, overtop its banks, and spread brick and steel over the land.
For an indeterminate time, then, he’d been traveling to the great trash mountain in the company of the Crows of the city’s river islands. He had no family hereabouts, as far as he knew, perhaps no family anywhere: a vagrant, as in many times past. Nobody disputed his taking a place in the river-island roosts at nightfall when he first found himself among them—that was winter courtesy of old, no Crow excluded so long as you mind your manners. He ate there in the mountain’s piles with the rest, now and then crying his delight as they did. He had a sense that he had not been doing this forever, for a lifetime, a Crow lifetime; but seasons came and passed and came again before he knew himself.