Ka

CHAPTER TWO

Dar Oakley had never meant or really wanted to stay and live in that stone place; he never thought of himself as belonging to the white flock of Brothers, or as residing there. His flock was the one of Crows, and he always assumed he’d have a place among them whenever he returned. And when he did, yes, the welcome was loud, and the story was told again of the Horse, and the one of the Eagle-Owl, and others of the old days. But as he came less often and for shorter times, his own brothers and sisters began to class him with the People and not with themselves. As though something of the People, the smell of their fires or food, clung to his plumage, and marked him out.

“Anyway,” Va Thornhill said to him. “We’ve got our own People now.”

Dar Oakley noted how that we had been used. “Oh?”

“They provide,” said Va, with an air of smirk. The Crows around him laughed and exchanged looks. “Better than Wolves.”

“They are Wolves,” said Fin Blue-Eye, at that moment alighting. “They name themselves that.” Dar Oakley had taught Fin the People word for those beasts, Wolves.

There were far Crow calls then, coming from the edge of the forest that stretched far up into the mountains and on to where these Crows did not go.

“Ah,” said Kon Eaglestail. “That’ll be them.”

“Come see,” Va Thornhill said to Dar Oakley.

It was a fog-shrouded day. Flying took caution. The Biggers set out over the vanished fields, and Dar Oakley followed, keeping watch for trees that might snake a limb toward you before you saw. People, he thought, were afraid of fog too, and of what might come out of it.

Just as he thought this, something did appear ahead. Along a path that People used, some being was emerging from the trees into the open land. It was large—very large—taller than a Bear walking on two legs. The Crows, who had come down onto the branches of a shaggy Hazel, were crying in welcome.

What was coming out of the forest was a gigantic bird, its huge head and heavy bill and staring eyes alarming. Wings drooping, it stumbled along on shod People feet as though uncertain of the ground. There could be no such huge bird in the world—and yet Dar Oakley suspected that once upon a time, in a different place, he had come upon one, and been chased and nearly caught by it. The Crow of that world. A swift fear gripped him.

Behind the bird a different beast came out of the forest and the fog: one with horns on its head like a wild Bull and fur like a Bear, in fact a Bear with a People face and beard, an ax carried in his bare People hand and resting on his hairy shoulder.

The flock was calling to these beings, laughing at them and at Dar Oakley at the same time. The Wolves! they cried. Our Wolves!

The being with the ax raised it to them in welcome. The bird-being shook its wings and seemed to beck.

Dar Oakley laughed too. It was People, of course it was, making themselves appear to be something they weren’t, something other People would fear.

Three then four more People, not appearing as other sorts of beings but only themselves in the common cloth and leathers, came following the beast-People. They carried clumsy unraveling bundles, and were waved on by the Bull-Bear. Ahead the winged one stumbled—it seemed to have a hard time seeing the ground it walked on—and tumbled over, coming in two: the human part crawled out from the hollow straw and wood part. His crew jeered—that was easy to see—and the one who had been the bird set off dragging his bird part after him.

From away up in the forest came Crow calls. Far first and then nearer. A Crow could locate those calls and know just where they were coming from.

“Those are our own,” Va Thornhill said. “There, and there. Come on. They have something.”

“What?” Dar Oakley asked.

“Come see,” Va Thornhill said, and clacked his bill three times in anticipation. The Crows were already heading up the path into the woods that the weird People had come down.

“Long ago,” Va Thornhill said as he and Dar Oakley flew and rested, “there was that Crow who learned a thing. Learned that People are unlike other beings—they often kill one another.”

“But they never eat the ones they kill,” Dar Oakley said.

“Yes! So if you make yourself a friend of People—”

“Yes,” said Dar Oakley. The fog was lifting around him, the clouds lying on the earth returning to the sky: the world coming clear.

“Look,” said Va Thornhill.

Down on the ground, off the path that the People used, pale on the wet black ground, were People, naked and unmoving: one, two, and a child or small one. The Crows who had called, and Dar Oakley’s gang coming in, were closing on them, but cautious and calling. Dead, yes, all. No threats. No eaters. All ours. Here, this way.

“See?” Va Thornhill said. One of the People, one who lay faceup, had been chopped open. It wasn’t hard to guess that their wrappings and all that they carried had been taken by the band that the Crows had called “our Wolves.”

“It’s good!” Fin Blue-Eye called. “Let’s eat!” One by one and then in numbers the Crows went down onto the bodies. Va Thornhill and Kon Eaglestail surveyed them with pride.

“How did you know?” Dar Oakley asked. “What made you think that these would be here, killed by those others?”

“You don’t get it,” Kon Eaglestail said. “It was we who gave them the news that these three were on the path.”

“Their prey,” Va Thornhill said. “It’s what they do.”

The ruckus at the corpses was getting louder, and would soon bring in other eaters.

“And you—you’re their Ravens,” Dar Oakley said. “Ravens guide Wolves to prey. So do you.”

“We, Dar Oakley,” said Va Thornhill. “We.” He seemed to Dar Oakley so swollen with self-satisfaction that he might burst.

“But why do these Wolves make themselves appear to be beings that they aren’t?”

The Biggers made gestures of ignorance or indifference. “Frighten the ones they hunt?” Fin Blue-Eye guessed.

“Who cares?” Va Thornhill said. “Let’s eat while there’s wealth left.”

They fell on the dead one lying faceup, the easiest to enter and already much dug into. As he grabbed and bit the cold flesh, Dar Oakley thought of the Brother, who had told him to give his fellow Crows good counsel. Likely they wouldn’t listen to him, even if he knew what good counsel was. But the thought of the Brother brought into his mind an image of the dish of stones on the floor of his cell, with only one last dark stone left this day to be moved: and Dar Oakley realized, with a tickle of discomfort and hilarity, that he was eating flesh on a Friday.

Only one of those People who had met with the Wolves gang had been able to run away. Near exhaustion from fear and flight through the dark and cold, he brought the news of the attack to the Abbey. He told them what he had seen, a huge bird, a Bull-Bear—beings not men, fog-demons perhaps. He told the Brothers that he and his family, good Christians, had been on their way to this Abbey, bringing with them the youngest son, who was to be given to the Brothers, an oblation; they’d brought other gifts too, now all stolen; and the boy dead with his parents. The Brothers armed themselves with a tall cross and went out pulling a cart to bring back the dead ones for burial. The Crows fled at their approach, watching resentfully from afar as the Brothers knelt to pray and then wrapped the poor despoiled bodies in cloths and bore them away, weeping over the blond child whom God had allowed to be taken.

All of which the Brother related to Dar Oakley, more than once.

“Brigands,” he said, mopping his brow with his sleeve. “Outlaws. Thieves and murderers.”

The Brother was given the task of digging a grave for the boy, another for the parents. He stood leaning on his shovel while two of the People who lived nearby and depended on the Abbey for their livelihoods dug. Around them, beneath the earth, were the Brother’s own father and mother (he’d pointed out to Dar Oakley where they were) and other kin.

“Men less than men,” he said. “Men who would kill like beasts for gain. Twisted into evil shapes by the beast-souls within. Homo homini lupus.”

Dar Oakley, up on a stone churchyard cross, nodded when the Brother said these things, cautious and obedient, not sure if the Brother had recognized him among the flock feeding on the dead People. He’d fled away with the others when the Brother had chased them off with his baculus, little stick, not a weapon but standing for a weapon (or for the lack of one). Now he looked down at the long, narrow vacancies the People were making, lined with stones. Where had he seen such work done before? A place for People to hide away their dead ones.

“Demons!” the Brother cried, and the ones doing the digging looked up in alarm. “Demons, devils out of Hell, sent to harry the blessed. Why would the good God allow them to?” He set to work, lifting a little dirt and tossing it. “We can’t know. You angels, conduct him safely into paradise, blessed child!” And he touched forehead, breast, and shoulders the way they all did all the time.

Toward evening they carried the dead boy from the church on a board that they lifted to their shoulders. The boy was wrapped head to toe and couldn’t be seen. With the tall cross the Abbot led them to the place the Brother had dug, and there they gently laid him, all singing all the while: calling God’s attention to the place, so that the child soul could know his way back to this place on the last day to rejoin the body. The parents they bore out and put together in the larger hole beside him.

Dar Oakley—having a sort of role on this day as cruel Death’s representative—sat looking down from the capstone of the churchyard cross and was not chased away.

As the Brothers spoke and sang, earth was thrown in on the wrapped People. One Brother carried a pot hung from a strap, in which hot coals had been put. Another took a handful of something from a pouch and scattered it over the coals.

Gray smoke arose. A puff of wind brought it to Dar Oakley. The rictal bristles above his nostrils rose: he had breathed in this smoke before, this heavy odor, somewhere, sometime; not here, not in the life he lived now. In Ymr. What is Ymr? This is Ymr: the world around drawing close to him, the People and People things large, the farther-off things small and vague. All in a moment he was no longer where he had been; but where he now was he had been before.

He saw his Brother go to the Abbot and kneel and speak rapidly to him: Dar Oakley could hear and understand. The Brother was asking permission to remain by the boy’s grave and pray through the night. The Abbot—tiny, sun-browned, and withered like a winter apple—wouldn’t allow it; the Brother begged again, bowing nearly to the Abbot’s gnarled feet.

“He was as I once was,” the Brother said. “I too was an oblation, my family’s gift. I was his age then.”

The Abbot looked up to the sky as though he saw something there, and put his hand on the Brother’s head and nodded.

Day was nearly gone when the hole the boy was laid in was filled again with the earth that had been taken from it, and his kin in their grave also covered. An Abbey servant brought a thick candle or torch made of bound reeds and butter, and a stone bottle of water, and placed these beside the Brother. The other Brothers departed, casting looks of annoyance at their Brother that Dar Oakley noticed and felt.

Then they two were alone.

Watch with me, said the Brother, in speech not like his common speech.

I will, Dar Oakley said without speaking—at least not in words of Ka—and the Brother nodded in gratitude.

So they stayed, the Crow on the cross, the Brother on his knees below. Now and then the Brother got up groaning from his knees and cast a pinch of the odorous stuff into the candle flame, where it let out its smoke, and Dar Oakley, near sleep, would wake again.

His bones rest here, the Brother said. His soul goes up.

Up? Dar Oakley asked.

Good souls go up, the Brother said, to live forever in heaven above; bad souls go down, far down under, to live in darkness.

Dar Oakley didn’t know this, about the soul that the Brothers talked of so often, a part of People that became detached at death. He thought he had once known something like it but something different. The smoke tasted of what he had known.

One day, the Brother said, when all things are accomplished, souls will return again to their bodies. So we pray here by this boy, that he will know the way to this gate of his resurrection, and not wander in the forest where the wild axmen killed him, unable to find where he lies.

I know who killed him, Dar Oakley said. I saw them.

Corve! said the Brother. Who are they? Where are they?

Dar Oakley didn’t know how to answer that. He thought about it. He fell asleep, and slept till the smell of the smoke woke him again.

It was near dawn, a faint light almost darker than darkness.

Corve, said the Brother. Look.

The earth and stones piled high over the place where the boy lay seemed to shift; pebbles rolled away—Dar Oakley thought it might be only the candle’s shaky light. But then he heard it too. The click of little stones rolling away together.

Something appeared there, at the center of the pile, something bright, yellow like a candle flame, but steady. It was poking out of the dirt, as though pushed up from below. The Brother was still, staring, whispering in his other sacred language.

What is it? Dar Oakley asked.

A ladder, the Brother said.

More of it appeared: the rails, then a rung, then another. Dar Oakley knew what a ladder was; the rails of this one bent together at the top, like the ladders the Brothers used for apple picking.

Golden, said the Brother.

Dar Oakley knew about gold. It was smooth and heavy, heavier than stone; or it was beaten thin, like bark. Sun-colored, not like silver. But this gold was not like that, and not like the gold of the Brothers’ special vessels, either.

The ladder kept coming up out of the ground, rung after rung, reaching toward the dark sky. Then there was more disturbance of the grave-earth, something more coming forth. A blond head, golden too.

Laudate dominum, the Brother whispered.

Two white hands appeared, fumbling out of the wrappings they had been bound in so as to grip the ladder’s rails and pull the boy from the grave. As he came out, the cloths around him fell away, and he could be seen to be whole, unharmed, the wounds on him healed or gone. All white, almost translucent, like an Owl’s egg; he glowed, enough to light the air around and the Brother, watching him unmoving, hands apart and lifted. In paradisum deducat te angeli.

The naked boy was now well off the ground and mounting higher. The top of the ladder couldn’t be seen; it disappeared into darkness. Before he, too, climbed up too high to be seen, the boy turned his glowing head on the Brother and the Crow.

You who ate me, he said. You who gathered me. You who dug a place for me. Remember me. Killed in the bud before I could learn to pray and taste God on my tongue. Remember me, mourn for me, and in Christ’s name I charge you, avenge me.

He looked up, then, as though to see how far up he still had to climb, and stepped to the next rung. A groaning or stirring came from the grave where his parents lay: calling him back? Asking for his help?

I never did, Dar Oakley said. I never ate him, I didn’t. Not him.

He watched the boy go out of sight, grow as dim as the clouded moon, then dim as a star, and gone, and the ladder followed him up. Day came.

“Corve,” the Brother said to Dar Oakley. “You must go away from this place, and on pain of death never return.”

They stood within the outermost of the three low concentric walls of stones and earth around the Abbey. Dar Oakley clung to the Brother’s hand. The Brothers and the Abbot, gathered there, all watched as Dar Oakley was cast, took wing, sank, rose, and was gone over the church-top. All of them crossed themselves and murmured.

No one believed the Brother had seen what he said he saw or had heard what he said he heard, and the Brother offered no witness except a Crow, who couldn’t speak, and who in the light of day wasn’t so sure himself. The Abbot thought it likely that the Brother had dreamed a deceiving dream. The Confessor asked why a saved soul would ask for vengeance; none would; they ask for mercy. The Brothers said their little Brother had been perverted by a devil in the form of a Crow: no true vision would be vouchsafed to such a one.

So a trial was held; Dar Oakley was declared anathema and sent away.

On the next Sunday the Brother went to the Abbot and begged to be allowed to make a pilgrimage, so that he might do penance for his foolishness and pray at a holy shrine for the soul of the boy, the soul that he now agreed he hadn’t seen. The Abbot, after a time of prayer and thought, said he might. It was the time of year for pilgrimage. No other Brother, however, chose to go along with him. The Brother took this without rancor or spite—the Confessor thought his experiences might have changed him—and on a green morning he set out alone, with a little food and drink in his leather satchel, a stout staff, a seashell for a begging bowl, and the Abbot’s kiss of peace on his cheeks.

The Abbey had fallen well behind him when he reached the stream that marked the limits of the Brothers’ demesne. From the branches of a willow growing by the bank Dar Oakley called.

“Corve,” the Brother called up to him. “The Willow is an evil tree. How can you sit in one?”

Dar Oakley crowed in delight. It was this tree, by this bend in the stream, by this islet where roses grew, that he had been told to visit every day until the Brother came to meet him; and it tickled the Crow strangely, how glad he was to see him again. He descended upon him, took a perch in the rough woolen stuff by his ear, and spoke the Crow word—one of the few the Brother had come to know—that means Tell me more.

“Well, the Willow,” the Brother said, girding up the skirts of his robe. “Everyone knows. In the night the Willow can pull up his roots and go walking like a man around and about; and might come up silently behind a traveler, take him in his long withies, and strangle him!”

He laughed, Dar Oakley laughed, and the Brother waded into the fast stream, stepping with care on the stony bottom and feeling with his staff. On the far bank the path went on, leading toward the holy site, some days’ walk away. Before they two came to it, they would reach the hall of the Brother’s clan.

“Are those of your kind ready?” the Brother asked. “Did you explain? Are they going to do it?”

Dar Oakley becked in answer. They were ready.

“Then let’s go on,” the Brother said, wringing the water from his robe, “to the hall of my kin, and do what we were charged to do.”

Dar Oakley knew about clans—he was himself of a clan, no matter that he had gone away from it for periods. But his clan wasn’t like a People’s clan. People knew the ones to whom they were related, and in exactly what degree; their clans included the dead, from whom they got their status and wealth, if they had any, and to whom they owed care and labor and the prayers that would help them go Up. It seemed to Dar Oakley that People were often uncertain whether one of these dead had gone Up, like the white soul he had seen, or Down, where the Brother said almost everyone he knew would go. Most weren’t Up or Down but in a middle place, and maybe it was thought that the prayers and the singing of the Brothers and rich gifts to the Abbey could push them Up. Dar Oakley couldn’t say. Crows have no dead to please or help.

After his banishment from the Abbey, before he went to meet the Brother at the Willow by the stream, Dar Oakley went home, to the old demesne—which was no journey at all, and yet was a long one: from Ymr into Ka.

They were glad to see him there; he was always good for a laugh, he and his People and his stories.

“Va Thornhill,” he said, having found Va busy hunting for nest materials in a thicket. “I have a question.”

“What’s your question, Dar Oakley?”

“Do you still follow those People who are Wolves?”

“Ha!” Va Thornhill said. “Their pack’s grown. No one’s as powerful as they. Don’t let your Brothers near them now.”

“They don’t need you anymore, then?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You’re still scouting for them.”

“We have been. Sometimes. And getting the riches they leave.”

Dar Oakley on a branch above snapped open his broad tail and spread his wings in a shudder—the Crow equivalent of a yawn and a stretch. “You,” he said, “are a smart Crow.”

Va Thornhill lifted some mossy stuff in his bill and blew it out.

“I’ll tell you something,” Dar Oakley continued. “I listen to People and hear about their doings. Say I were to learn about People who were intending to go over the mountain, along the path they have through the forest where your Wolves go. If I told you about that, would you bring your Wolves there? Would they follow?”

Crows, I think, detest bargains. They don’t speculate, and they don’t like the future—for which they had no word then. “Well,” Va Thornhill said. “Just now it’s hard to get Crows together.”

“Ah yes,” said Dar Oakley. “Nests. Freeholds. Young.”

Va Thornhill looked up and billwise and darkwise, as though he would prefer not to discuss these homely things with the other Crow. “It’s busy now, is all.”

“It certainly is,” Dar Oakley said.

“You,” Va Thornhill said, “have no mate.”

This was true just then, though Dar Oakley knew he had had mates, and young, too. “But this is easy prey,” he said. “Rich. If I bring it, can you bring the Crows?”

“Well,” said Va Thornhill. “I just said.”

Suddenly Dar Oakley descended and came down heavily so close to Va Thornhill that the big Crow dodged away. “Tell me not to bother and I won’t,” he said. “I’d just as soon. If the Brothers caught me at it, I’d be killed.” He aimed a darkwise eye at Va Thornhill. “And you don’t need those Wolf leavings, do you? There’s always bugs to find, no? Peewits’ eggs. This and that.”

Va Thornhill eyed him back. “You just go learn what you can, Dar Oakley,” he said in a sudden angry hiss. “If you’re so sure. Come tell us. We’ll bring the Wolves in.” He turned back to his search for soft nest linings. “Somehow I think you know more than you say, Dar Oakley.”

“How could that be?” Dar Oakley said, bill high, an honest Crow. “We’re kin, aren’t we?”

The Brother’s kin knew all about the Wolves gang. They had the region in fear, doors barred in the night, householders listening for the horrid wail of them. A storm of hail that had nearly destroyed the springing crops was certainly their doing, or had been caused by their evil. How could they be fought against? By all reports they weren’t men at all but great demons who drank up the blood of their victims, one taller than a tree—a bird twice a man’s height—beings with tusks and claws both. When the fighters of the clan had gone in search of them, they’d vanished into air and couldn’t be found.

“No, no,” the Brother told his kin. “Men, mere men. Thieves. Godless. Not drinkers of blood. Killers, yes—but cowards, killers of women and children.”

The uncles and brothers and sisters gathered in the hall weren’t sure. Those Wolves, they said, were always accompanied by a murder of Crows—death-birds with devil souls. Here the uncles and brothers regarded Dar Oakley perched on the back of the Brother’s chair. Who lowered his head humbly.

“Not this Crow,” the Brother said, pointing to Dar Oakley. “This Crow has repented of his evil ways, and hopes for redemption. Watch.” He turned to the Crow up behind him and said, “Corve. Who made you?”

Dar Oakley twisted his tongue within his mouth and squeezed his larynx. God, he croaked. God. The Brother’s kin made sounds all together, moans of awe or cries of delight and wonder. Some drew away, some leaned forward.

“Bless this house, Corve, and its Dux and his lady.”

Dar Oakley lifted his bill up, down, darkwise, daywise. The People looked at each other and nodded. The hall was dim and smelly—the People-smell of wool and smoke, cooked food and soured ale. The Brother’s elder brother, head of the clan since their father’s death, sat in a tall seat, the others around him on stools or standing. Being so close to so many, armed and thickly bearded, was uncomfortable, almost unbearable, but Dar Oakley didn’t think he could make it to the small, low window without being caught or struck by a weapon. So he kept still and tried to obey.

How had it come to be that he was now a Crow who did what People asked of him? Once done with this, he wouldn’t anymore.

Since morning the Brother had laid out before his People the story and the plan, and they had argued and declaimed. Now the Brother opened his satchel and took out a little box of wood and beaten gold, and after he had murmured words in his other language, he opened it. The clan around him made again that sound, of satisfaction, awe, fear, whatever it was.

From his perch on the chair Dar Oakley peeked in. Inside the box was a small, yellowed meatless bone. Dar Oakley thought he knew where it had come from, and having lived so long with the Brothers, he felt a strange shudder of fear or guilt at what the Brother had done. The clan came close and bent over the box. Some of them knelt. All their eyes were on the bone, and it seemed to Dar Oakley that the pressure of their looking drew something from it: the fragment of toe or finger faintly but distinctly began to glow.

“Blessed Saint,” the Brother addressed it, “who has helped us in the past. Help us now to defeat the enemies who afflict us. Help us to avenge those who have no kin of their own to do it. In Jesus’s name we ask this.”

Dar Oakley, with all the others, bowed his head.

Crows, flying singly and by twos and threes into the forest that covers the mountain. When some halt to rest, others coming on behind overfly them; when they rest, the ones that they passed pass them. The whole body of them moves forward that way, calling now and then to the scouts and those standing to watch over their passing, and their calls keep the flock—that part of it engaged in this action, the smart curious ones, the Biggers—together, going toward what they know they seek.

On the faint track that goes through the trees and over the hump of the hill and down into the shadow of the glen, a small band of People hasten, two males and a female, a few Sheep, burdens, staves. When they have gone down from the sun-shot heights into the shadows, they stop; here the path goes through a narrow place between high rocks, and a stream has cut a passage. Overhead in the trees the Crows have noticed them, and some are already going back the way they came with the news: People on the trail, with their animals, vulnerable.

The Wolves at their camp in caves overhung with vines and low-hanging branches of Yew look up: they hear the Crows, and by now can tell when those birds speak to their kind and when they speak to the Wolves. Clever birds! Calling their women, the Wolves begin to prepare, turning themselves into other beings, laughing, ululating.

Later now, and the travelers have set themselves up in that unpromising place by the stream, and seem ready to spend the night; and night is coming. They look around themselves, into the trees, back the way they came, as though expecting to see what soon they do see: apparitions of impossible beasts, rushing toward them, gesticulating. They don’t run, they don’t prepare to resist though they grip their staves tighter; they cling together, and seem resigned, as certain animals can do in the presence of predators.

The People beasts have set up their ghastly keening, voices or instruments; their followers rush in after them, and the travelers sink farther into themselves; a Crow looking down thinks they have shut tight their eyes. One of the Wolves lifts his ax. At that sign, as though summoned by it, other People, armed too and yelling, burst out of the cover of the woods where they have hidden and charge the Wolves from behind; and from down the path leading from the rocks, horsemen, swords drawn.

The watching Crows, scandalized, mystified, rise up higher into the trees. What’s this? Who? Fly! Stay! Dar Oakley—just then arriving among them—looks on, not amazed like them but not showing that he isn’t, he hopes. What does amaze him, as the mounted People charge in among the Wolves, is to see the Brother among them, though he said he was forbidden to be. White skirts pushed up between his legs and his sandaled feet sticking out, he rides up behind one of his clan, raising a sword too, yelling too.

The Wolves are caught in the throat of the rocks between the ones on foot behind them and the horsemen ahead. Those “travelers” have fled away into the trees. The Dux coming in on a big dappled gray whacks at the bird-beast, who is trying to extricate himself from his disguise; he gets free and is trying to climb the rocky ledge when the Brother, who is also the brother of the Dux, comes at him. The rider twists his Horse in the narrow space and the Brother, on the Horse’s bobbing rump, brings his sword down on the bandit’s head, and again. The bandit falls, tries to touch his hurt head, tries to rise and can’t; lies still.

Dar Oakley watches the Brother raise his sword high and cheer (he can’t hear it in all the noise of the fight, but he can see the Brother’s exulting tongue and teeth). The other Wolves have thrown themselves on the ground before their attackers, faces down, hands up, and the Dux and his cohort stand over them, threatening but not attacking, like Crows around an Owl. None of the Wolves has escaped.

The Brother has slid from the horse’s back and kneels by the bird-beast, the man he has killed. An old grizzled man. Dar Oakley thinks of the time the Brother knelt to pray by the dead pony in the snow, when he and the Crows first met, which has brought Dar Oakley here now. The Brother crosses himself and covers his eyes with a hand.

“Kin, are we?” says a Crow at Dar Oakley’s ear. Dar hasn’t noticed Va Thornhill settle by him, but now turns to find the bigger bird’s eye on him.

You will betray.

Given the Crow’s reputation among us People, it’s hard to credit what Dar Oakley insists on: that a Crow can’t lie to another Crow, simply hasn’t the trick of it. Boast, evade, mock, exaggerate, confuse: but not lie. So to Va Thornhill he can answer nothing but nothing.

That’s how I have imagined it: what I would have seen if I had been in that glen at the place where the path narrows between the rocks. It’s what I make of Dar Oakley’s story as he tells it now, what he saw and what he could name then of People things and People acts. We can only think about those things we can name, and his thought is Crow thought and is not mine; but if he can think about me, and my kind, maybe I can think as he does, and as he did then. If he can be in Ymr, I can be in Ka.

In Ymr then—at least in that wide part of the human world, at whose western edge, I believe, Dar Oakley then lived—all People were divided into three: those who tend the land and the flocks; those who ride Horses and bear arms; and those who pray, make sacrifices, remember stories and tell them. It was as though there were different People species, and (like Crows and Rooks) they couldn’t mix. But they could, and did; stories from that world are full of People who behaved not as the kind they were born to be but as one of the other kinds, and some of them triumphed and lived happily, and some were made to suffer for it. The Brother had triumphed—Dar Oakley had seen it, in the shadow of the glen—and now must suffer.

“I took up arms,” he told Dar Oakley, as they went along. “A priest of God, my hands consecrated to his service. Those hands spilled human blood, and I have to do penance.”

Dar Oakley could perceive the Brother’s shame and sorrow, but really, People happily killed People all the time—at least those with weapons did—and why should this one feel sorry? What he’d done—it was good for People!

But he set out with the Brother again for the holy place to which the Brother had told his Abbot he would travel, to see what the Brother would do there, and what penance meant. The Crows of the region, Va Thornhill’s flock, angry at having their good living interfered with, pursued him and the Brother a long way, yelling threats and insults that Dar Oakley tried to ignore. What penance would he be made to undertake? Best to be gone till they forgot about it, if they ever did.

Soon enough the two of them had left that demesne and entered another, where Dar Oakley knew no one. He’d fly on far ahead of the Brother to forage—snails, grubs, small cadavers—being careful not to alarm or challenge anyone nearby; and then he’d return to the Brother, no matter how far they’d gone apart. That seemed miraculous to the Brother, but it was only that Dar Oakley could see him from a long way off, and follow his movements.

The Brother couldn’t or wouldn’t eat Crow food, though his discipulus (as he had come to call Dar Oakley) brought it to him like a good Crow parent. Instead, with his seashell he begged at houses and from travelers, giving blessings in return for food and small coins, asking the way to the place ahead, which he named and many of them knew.

“Saints have been served by beasts,” he told Dar Oakley as they went along. “The Saint we go toward now. When she was young, no one would listen to her preach. The pagans clamored to kill her, Discipule, and she fled to the forest. There she preached to the birds and the animals. A family of Foxes came, vixen and kits, and sat patiently to listen, and in time became devoted to the Saint; when she returned to the People and converted many to the Faith, this Fox family remained with her, serving her to the end of her days.”

The road had widened, and become plain, and there were more People on it. Some walked with sticks propped under their arms, some were carried in trundles pushed by others. So many of them, faces fixed on the way ahead. Dar Oakley, unsettled and oppressed, ascended away.

How many stories did that Brother know, and why did he have to keep on telling them? It was disturbing. When you heard one, you thought of yourself in it, seeing it happen, which it never had, not anyway to you. It put things into your eyes that your eyes hadn’t seen but now they must. De te fabula, the Brother would say when a story was done, lifting an instructing finger: the story is about you.

Thinking these thoughts, he’d gone on a good way, not paying attention. But something that had been growing in him all morning now came clear to him. In an elongated moment, wing beats slowing, he understood that he knew this place, which he should not know. He knew it, and he knew he knew.

Not the new road, and the People all going one way. Not the folded land all bare of trees now and covered with plowed fields and People houses like mushroom patches. But yes, the line of the darkwise mountains. The ragged shape of that long lake he was approaching, the silver shudder of sunlight across it and the waterbirds rising. He set out over it. There would be an island in the middle of the water, he knew, where he’d rested on the day that he, or the Crow he was then, had first seen People: and yes, there it was, where it had been. But that high round stone building that sat on it, stones laid on stones—that had not been there. Now treeless, the island seemed larger than it had been, as though the waters had receded and bared more land.

When there were trees there and nothing else, he had one day—hadn’t he?—convinced his flock amid their uproar and doubts and mocking that they could make a living from the People.

Once there was a Crow who learned how to feed his clan on the flesh of dead People, but now we have forgotten the trick of it.

That had been him, yes, he had taught them that then.

The land rising from the lakeshore, where the People had built a settlement: he recognized it. That rocky ledge breaking from the hillside above it, and the way up to it that the People had climbed, carrying their dead. He could see them climbing, though they weren’t there.

Fox Cap. He remembered Fox Cap.

Child lost in the woods within sight of home. Peacemaker neither male nor female. Walker into worlds where time didn’t pass. Through her he had come to know Ymr, how large it was, how it was all made of meanings, which fill it without taking up any space at all. She was—of course!—the reason why he had understood the Brother’s speech and his stories from the first. Why he was spoken to by People who were dead, from the realm of stories where they lived. He, Dar Oakley, was himself inside a story, which was also inside him, packed within him like another Crow, and he knew now why he had for so long felt both crowded and empty.

He banked over the eternal great cross of the ways—billwise, daywise, darkwise, otherwise. From the lakeshore, where now pilgrims milled and rickety houses of wood stood on posts out in the water, he had once seen the boat set out that carried the Singer’s excarnated bones to be buried. The boat that in time bore hers as well.

How long ago?

How many seasons had it taken to pile stone on stone to make that place, that People place that now stood in the middle of the island where four tall stones had watched alone over the Singer’s bones? He’d once seen the Brothers at the Abbey lay just one course of stone in a week of summer days. One single course. The courses of stone that made this building—uncountable. Moss grew on the slabs of its roof.

He wasn’t an old Crow. No Crow could be that old. Afraid and sinking, he turned away from the island and into the wind from shore.

I asked him: Was it then that you knew? Knew what had happened, how you had gone down into the Other Lands with Fox Cap and stolen life and lost it and yet in the stealing of it had earned this odd undying? And he said no, he didn’t know all of that then and isn’t sure of it even now; but yes, he had remembered Fox Cap, and how he had gone down with her into the Other Lands; and he thought that if he could go down again into those lands, again he would seek her there, and if he found her he would tell her that he persisted still on earth, and that however long he now lived he would not forget her again.

Bells tolled across the water like huge, slow heartbeats that displaced Dar Oakley’s own quick ones. Boats had come from the island, manned by black-clothed Brothers, who with the help of shore dwellers hauled the boats in and tied them. The People groaned and pressed forward to get places on them. The Brothers went among the People, listening, touching; those farther back in the crowd lifted hands to draw the black Brothers’ eyes toward them. A number were chosen to go onto the boats; Dar Oakley’s Brother was one chosen. Seen from above, the bowed heads of the People in the laden boat were a clutch of mottled brown eggs, with who knew what inside them. The long oars raised white blooms where they struck the gray water. Those left behind unchosen waded into the water as though to walk out to the island, following the boats.

The island the boat pulled toward was becoming for Dar Oakley the only island: not one of two—the island of then, the island of now—but just one. He lowered his wings, dove toward it.

First comes a Saint, the Brother had once told him, to where nothing is but earth and stone. In time that Saint’s bones are laid where God determines. Around them is put the altar; around the altar, the church, around the church, the Abbey. The Abbey draws in those who come to seek aid from the Saint; many stay to build houses and plant fields, and these spread farther. The whole land around is given the name of the Saint at its center.

This, he said, is how the world grows larger.

The long hide boat full of pilgrims reached the island. Brothers from the Abbey came out from their dwelling and made further choices among them, some to go on inside, others not. Dar Oakley, perched on a slab of the roof, saw one of the black-robes bend over the Brother, who clasped his arms and whispered in his ear. He was taken inside.

Dar Oakley overflew the buildings, some unfinished and unroofed, and looked in wide windows. Black-robes came and went. The Brother wasn’t in the public places of the church amid the kneeling People seeking aid, nor behind the curtain in the special place where on their behalf the Brothers did their hidden holy things. Nor in the cloister, where perhaps their Saint, like the Brother’s Saint, lived in a box.

You will never die.

But between the church and the cloister—in a small place accessible to Dar Oakley only through a high window narrow as a crack—yes, there he was, though Dar Oakley didn’t at first know it was he, for he lay facedown on the floor between two rows of standing Brothers. Before them a thing sat in the middle of the floor: a sort of dome, like the lid of a People’s cauldron, but larger than the lid of any cauldron Dar Oakley had ever seen. The Brothers ceased singing and helped the Brother to his feet—and he saw Dar Oakley above in the window. He lifted his arms to him.

“Corve,” he said. “Discipule. Venite.”

The Brothers all looked up.

“You can’t bring a Crow here,” one whispered.

“It’s the Crow who has brought me,” the Brother said.

They looked from him to Dar Oakley, displeased or alarmed; one waved a black sleeve at him; he lifted wings but didn’t go away. They decided to ignore him. Each of them in turn embraced the Brother, and two of them went to the black dome in the middle of the floor. With some effort they lifted it away. There was nothing beneath it. Less than nothing: a great hole, going down into darkness, its bottom unseeable.

“Domine me adjuvate,” the Brother whispered, kneeling again as though unable to stand. “Lord God help me now.”

The Brothers went away, casting a last doubtful look at the bird of ill omen, all but two who stood apart, hooded. When they were gone, Dar Oakley came down to where the Brother knelt, three wing beats loud in the enclosed space.

The Brother sighed, and sat back on his heels, which (Dar Oakley knew) kneeling Brothers were never to do. He clasped his hands together lightly in his lap. “Corve,” he said. “Two Saints lie together here, and have for centuries. One was lame all his life, and those who are crippled or lame now come to ask his help, either to cure their affliction or teach them how to bear it. The other Saint was she I told you of, the Saint of the Foxes.”

Saints? Saints were dead People separated from their bones but somehow still residing in them or with them, whose voices and faces the People who came near the bones could sometimes hear and see. The one whose voice Dar Oakley had heard. The naked boy climbing his golden ladder to the place Up, whose command had brought him and the Brother here. They were Saints. If the Singer and Fox Cap were Saints too now, and were anywhere but in their bones, they were—they had to be—Down.

“Those Saints, Corve, they watch together at this portal, which is the way to the place of sorrow and cleansing. It’s where I must go, and remain a day and a night. If I can endure that, and whatever befalls me there, I can be forgiven.”

His body, forever restless and unquiet, was entirely still, more still than Dar Oakley had ever seen it.

“I have been granted this,” he said. “It’s not for everyone. I have been examined, and I have made my offering, and I am permitted.” His eyes had not left the circle of dark downwardness before him. “I’m afraid, Corve.”

So was he, Dar Oakley, afraid and repelled, and yet he stepped a step sidewise to be nearer the Brother.

“After a day and a night,” the Brother said, “if I haven’t returned, the Brothers will know I never will. I will be damned, and will remain there forever.”

Dar Oakley thought, You don’t return from there. That land returns you here, when you have done there whatever you do. He wanted to tell the Brother that his one-day-and-a-night might take many seasons to pass. He had known all that once and knew it now again, but he couldn’t say it.

“We’ll go,” he only said in his own words of Ka. “Let’s go.”

The Brother seemed to understand that, and stood. He went to the hole. Grasses and weeds starred with white flowers had grown thick around the rocks the time long ago when Dar Oakley had gone down into it. The Brother sat on its lip, and weeping now, and groaning through gritted teeth, he let himself down within. When his shaved head had almost disappeared, he held out a shaking hand, palm up, for Dar Oakley to step onto. Time went away, then was now, Dar Oakley stepped onto the hand and was lowered into darkness. Above them the two black-robes lowered the iron cover over them.

It was a treeless, featureless place, as though the trees here, like those in the land above, had over time been cut and burned—but the trees he had once seen here hadn’t been trees (so Fox Cap had told him) and they couldn’t be cut, and there was no time here. No time, no lies, only one of each thing.

Unless this place now was not the same place.

You needn’t fear that you won’t return from here, the Brother said. They can’t keep you. In this land there are only immortal souls, and you don’t have one. You are but a beast, and can’t sin.

If that’s so, Dar Oakley said, then how can it be that I’m here at all?

Maybe, the Brother said, you are not a bird at all, but a spirit. I’ve wondered. They said so in the Abbey, that you were. An evil spirit, or the hiding place for one.

They walked on—the Crow hopping to keep up—over broken flints that showed a faint path: the only thing that made this place a place.

I know it’s not so, the Brother said. But you aren’t an angel-guardian, either. Too naughty for that.

I am what I am, Dar Oakley said.

It may be, the Brother said, that you are a kind of middle spirit. There are many such. Spirits neither bad nor good, though they may be willful. They live long lives, maybe as long as till the Day of Judgment. But they won’t be judged. No, no, not they.

Dar Oakley couldn’t tell if it hurt the Brother to think this, that there were beings who wouldn’t be judged; if it comforted him; if he was jealous. All he knew was that this was a place where souls (the Brother said) were tested and judged, and that the Brother was afraid of that, so afraid that he could hardly stand upright the way he must go. Dar Oakley hoped he was a middle spirit; it seemed the best thing to be. He wondered what behavior he could show to prove it.

Now there should be a valley, the Brother said. A valley of shadow.

And there was: the land ahead of them became one, as though torn open just by the saying of the word valley. There might be a glitter of river down in it; it ran bare and dark to a red sunset. Dar Oakley took flight, and could see, at the head of the valley, a figure standing and looking away along it.

She. He was certain. She wore clothing she’d never worn in life; she was young here and straight and her hair was fiery. Had she got back into her flesh, flesh he had himself bitten and torn and swallowed? No, this was her down here, a soul. He tried to cry out, but though in this place he could talk—in a tongue neither his nor the Brother’s—he could not call a plain call. He flew over her to show himself to her, and she saw him and smiled, but not in recognition; and she set out on her bare feet down the way into the valley. It was clear they were to follow.

It was she, he knew it; but did she know who she was?

Blessed Saint! the Brother cried, coming up breathless and reaching out to her, but she didn’t hear, or didn’t turn, only went on, her bare feet skimming over the rocks, her gray unbelted dress moving with her steps. He remembered how the dress of those here seemed not put on but a part of them, like his own plumage. The place around her was enriched as she crossed it, though she paid no attention to that either: scurrying People half-glimpsed, strange wailings, tall cut stones with metal staples and rings embedded in them. She came to the river, black water tinged with the red of the sinking sun. A rubbled pass led down to the water’s edge past the bones of a Horse.

She watched there as though awaiting something. Her eyes were mild and unseeing.

Was this his doing too, Dar Oakley’s?

He could not be damned, the Brother said: he had no immortal soul, and couldn’t sin. Yet he did sin, and he’d lived again after dying: he had stolen that power from Fox Cap, and his sin had brought her here, when she should instead have lived forever in the sun and he should be long dead and eaten to the bones and the bones become dust. Dar Oakley longed to speak to her, hear her voice. But she had become no longer a person but a task: this task.

Soon a cockleshell boat appeared, making for shore, with two ancient Brothers in white rowing. The Brother, seeing them, rushed sliding and slipping down the bank, and Dar Oakley followed.

The two boatmen looked up but made no other sign of welcome or recognition, occupied with getting their little boat secure. Their white beards nearly reached their knees. Then one gestured to the Brother, a gathering-in gesture, and when the Brother reached them, the two pulled him aboard as he clung to them gratefully. Dar Oakley watched them push away from the bank with their oars. Should he follow? He had promised to go where the Brother went, but he wanted more to follow Fox Cap, speak to her if he could. He arose, turning: but Fox Cap was gone. He ascended up and over the no-place, but couldn’t see her. Then when he banked back toward the river, the boat was gone. So was the river. So was the way they had taken to reach this place. You never go back in again by the same way, Fox Cap had said to him so long ago. Because you never do go back anywhere. You only go on.

The sun hadn’t set, hadn’t sunk at all, as though it couldn’t. In the folds and clefts of the land beneath him, he could see People hidden or trapped, and People-shaped black beasts who were busily tormenting them—it made him think of the Wolves gang and their victims, and of Crows, too, settled on those victims, dagging for flesh and bickering. He kept flying toward the dull sun, and now he perceived large birds coming out of it, a flock, moving toward him.

No, not birds. They were beasts of earth, but with wings stuck onto their backs, which beat rapidly like the wings of Moths. Fat-bellied, with naked tails, mouths full of Wolf-teeth. How did their puny wings carry them? He was amid them, going the way they went, as though they had drawn him in. One cried aloud and pointed below: it had seen prey of some kind, and summoned the others to go down, buffeting Dar Oakley with their wings as they passed him. The smell of them was terrific. And down on the black ground he could see the Brother toiling along alone. The winged beasts—it took Dar Oakley a moment to understand this—had been seeking him.

They descended in a mass. The Brother looked up in fear, but all he could do was wave his arms at them to bat them away like hornets. They fastened on him and lifted him up, each holding a part of him, and crying in triumph they bore him away wriggling, a fish in an Osprey’s talons.

Later on, when Dar Oakley and the Brother had both returned to the land of the living, the Brother would tell Dar Oakley that it was then, just then that he was sure he was to be damned, and would never escape. Those two white-bearded Brothers who had borne him over the water? In life they had been kind to him, and when he was first committed to their care at the Abbey, they had brought him out of the despair he had felt. He had often prayed by their graves. Maybe those prayers had brought them to him at the black river, to carry him over. Holy men! But they could go no farther with him. And then he had been alone, with no help from anyone.

“The pains of Hell got hold upon me,” he’d say. “The sinners and the demons strove to drag me down with them farther into death, but I fought them off. Alone.”

Here he would pause in the tale—whenever he told it, which was often—and look up to the sky as though for pity, and then at Dar Oakley in reproach—oh, how well the Crow had come to know such People faces!—and Dar Oakley would mumble like a fledgling in apology, though there was nothing he’d done wrong. He knew it. The angel who had judged him down there had told him so.

How long Dar Oakley searched for the Brother in the dark valley he can’t say—a day, a year, a season—because none of those were discernible there. Even the valley itself wasn’t always there. If he looked for it below him, he could see it, but if he looked away from it, he’d have to search for it again, as though his looking were all that brought it into being.

And something else came clear to him: the changeless red of the sky darkwise wasn’t a setting sun, and wasn’t darkwise. There seemed to be no sun here. It was a vast fire burning inside a mountain, glowing out through caves and fissures, spitting flame like a blacksmith’s forge. He went, reluctantly, closer to this horror, toward which winged beasts flew like Rooks toward a night roost. They drew him along with them, seemed to think he was one of them—he was black, as they were, and winged, as they were.

Where you going?

That was a voice—he’d been spoken to by a black Boar with a Cock’s tail, flying beside him.

Don’t know, Dar Oakley replied. Looking for someone.

Oh, don’t be picky, the beast said. Plenty everywhere to work on.

No, no, Dar Oakley said. Just this one. A Brother.

Oho, said the flying Boar. Lots of them here.

One in particular, Dar Oakley said. Just come.

He couldn’t tell if the being was giving this thought, but then it said, Little, fat, peevish, whiny?

Well, Dar Oakley said. Yes.

I know that soul! he shrieked with glee, and showed tusks. I worked on him! Follow me, follow!

He descended, flapping his bat wings, and a few other beasts came after him, and Dar Oakley followed them.

Peck their eyes out! one cried to him, grinning, a beast with a thrashing snake’s tail. That’s your way, yes? Then peck their eyes out again!

Dar Oakley, beating through the heavy air, looked down on People—souls—in travails of every kind, inflicted by beasts like the ones he flew with. It was clear to him now that, whatever they said, the worst thing for People isn’t that they die, but that they never do.

How long will they be done to this way? he asked. When does it stop?

Stop? cried the snake-tailed one who had urged him to peck out eyes. Never! Never ever! Never, never, never!

One day in seven they can rest, said the Boar. Look there.

Dar Oakley perceived, amid a mass of sufferers, two wide dishes or bowls that held a number of large dark stones and one white one. A black beast like a strong People fighter picked up a black stone from the dish of the white stone, and dropped it into the other. At this the tormented souls seemed to weep and thrash with impatience.

Waiting for the White Stone day. But how do they know, Dar Oakley wondered, when one day ends here and another begins?

That’s him, isn’t it! said his guide, unrolling a jointless arm and pointing to a low promontory or ledge not far off.

The Brother was there, kneeling before a People-shaped beast, black and hairy and horned, with great yellow teeth—surely what the Brother called a demon. The Brother was naked, his body marked with bruises and cuts; he wrung his lifted hands in terror or supplication.

Judgment! cried the snake-tailed beast. Going to go hard for him!

Dar Oakley looked again, and as he looked the black demon and the black mountain and the smoky sky ceased to be there. Instead a person in white, female she seemed to be, pale and golden, stood before the Brother—it was she whom he appealed to—and beyond her were white towers, almost invisible, rising into a clear sky, and a shining bridge that led up to them, so long and pitched so high it vanished into white distance.

Dar Oakley banked to leave his crew of tormentors and descend, and at that the place of the black demon and the black mountain and the flames appeared again. When he banked the other way—right, he thought was the word that People used for this side of him—only the other, the light and white place, appeared. And yet (it was quite clear as he neared the ground) the two beings, angel and demon, were actually side by side, talking together. Arguing.

He settled among various beings large and small who were gathered there and listening. No one paid him mind.

Damned! he heard the black one cry, pointing a long-nailed finger at the Brother. A damned soul.

Can’t be, the other said with white hand raised. He’s not dead yet. There’s time to repent.

Not dead yet! the black one bellowed. Why, here he is before us!

His body still lives. It awaits his return.

Oho! One of those tricks, the demon said. Well, still.

No, said the other. No damnation. Not yet.

Dar Oakley, like the Brother, looked from one to the other as each being spoke; and when they looked toward the right-hand side, they saw the towers and the bridge and the sky, and when they looked the other way, they saw the black mountain and the fires.

But he’s a damned sinner, said the demon. He knows it too. Look at him sniveling. Shitface! Coward!

He is a priest of God, said the angel, her voice sounding like the voices of the Brothers’ choristers. He came willingly here to be judged, and he has suffered willingly. He will have mercy.

Gets to choose his own fate, does he? And here I thought such a judgment was God’s alone, and always just!

You! What can you know of God’s judgments? Does God share the secrets of his heart with you?

I know this, said the black one. This person did a murder. And he a priest! Does he get to forgive himself for that?

Done for cause, she said. To protect others. The People of that place, and his Abbey. Penance will cleanse him.

See how you are? said the demon indignantly. He did a murder! A murdered murderer is still a murder. Look!

He hauled out from nowhere a body, a shabby sooty grizzled person, still in the rags of his bird costume.

Tell what you know, he commanded.

The murdered Wolf tried to answer but couldn’t, only choked, black spittle coming from his mouth. The white being crossed her arms and shook her head in mild impatience. Then she pressed her hands together before her and looked upward. With a bell-like voice she spoke a word; and from the white clouds of her realm a ladder, a golden ladder, descended rung by rung.

Oh, thank God, the Brother whispered.

The martyred boy came down, bare feet feeling for each step. His ladder was now poised delicately above but not touching the filthy stones. Turning to them but looking at nothing or at everything with his wide golden eyes, he lifted a hand, the first two long fingers raised—Dar Oakley had seen the Abbot do the same.

He spoke, his sweet voice not always audible amid the rumblings of the earth and the shrieks of beasts and souls. He told how he had asked the Brother to take revenge on those who had murdered him, that it was a fault in him to demand that, a fault that because of his youth and his goodness had been forgiven and wiped away. The Brother had done in love and kindness only what the boy had asked.

He ceased speaking then, and ascended away.

There, said the angel. This man is free. He will have life enough to atone for his crime, if crime it was.

I refuse to consent! the demon roared, and fires flamed from the mountain beyond. If his body lives a hundred years, it can’t wipe out his crimes!

Seven times seventy times. If repentance is genuine. Don’t argue with the rules.

I call a witness! My own witness! the demon said, throwing out his hand. I call—the Crow!

Dar Oakley stared at the being’s indicating finger. Himself? He felt the eyes of the beasts around him turn his way.

The Crow! the winged things cried, pressing closer. The Crow!

He thought they’d eat him if he didn’t obey. The angel from her white realm summoned him with her baculus to come forward. In one reluctant wing beat he was next to the Brother, who wouldn’t look at him. He wondered if the Brother was wrong, and even though he was a Crow he was damnable after all, and what that might be like.

Give your evidence, the demon said, crossing his hairy arms before him just as the angel had crossed her slim white ones.

I don’t have any, Dar Oakley said.

Don’t lie! You were there with him in the rocks of the glen. Tell about his sword, his wicked grin, tell about the joy with which he cleft the head of his victim!

I don’t remember that, Dar Oakley said, and he didn’t, but at the demon’s telling of it he began to.

Speak, the demon demanded. Or you’ll go into the fires yourself. How would you like that?

Stop it, the angel said. You are coercing the witness.

They went on disputing, but Dar Oakley stopped listening. He had begun to see—perhaps because of his Crow eyes, set far apart, able to take so much in—that all around others were likewise being judged. Countless debates like this one were proceeding on stone piles and ledges, countless People souls thrust wriggling into the fire by beast-things, a few escaping up the slippery bridge to the shining towers as winged black things tried to pluck them off.

Long ago Fox Cap had told him: in Ymr is a thing of every kind there can be, but only one of each. In this place, though, Dar Oakley saw only one kind of thing, endlessly repeated.

I hate it here, he said. And in his own tongue: “I hate it here.” The towers and the mountain shuddered as though they heard.

Death-bird, the demon called, as though from far away. You will answer, or serve me here forever.

No, Dar Oakley said. I’m not of this realm. You can’t keep me here. Fubun on all of you.

Corve! the Brother whispered, and put out a warning hand. But Dar Oakley knew it was true, whatever they thought. The Brother could be judged and suffer here, but he, Dar Oakley, couldn’t. Not because he was a living being, not because he was a Middle Spirit, not because he hadn’t sinned, but because he wasn’t here at all.

You, he said. You are all of Ymr. I am of Ka. I am not yours.

He stretched his wings, lowered himself, beat down as he leapt upward, and was aloft, drawing his feet to his body. Hell fell away below him faster than he could fly up into what should have been sky but grew ever blacker, with clouds like dark boulders; it was as though he could reach and touch it. In not many wing beats he first felt and then saw another being near behind and then passing him: it was the Brother, his robe on him again, sandals drooping from his flying feet. Dar Oakley caught up with him and fastened to him; he lost his sight; there was an odor of earth and dank stone, an awful closeness drawing closer, holding them.

Then nothing.

Then the Brother’s voice, his ordinary voice, next to his ear: “When will we be gone downward?”

He could smell the Brother’s flesh. “We’ve come back,” he said. The Brother didn’t respond, but when a heavy clanking came from above them, he startled and stirred. A strip of day. The door out of Hell. It opened wider.

“What became of me?” the Brother asked, and Dar Oakley couldn’t answer. Hands were reaching in to pull him out, and the Crow that rode on him as well. Glad cries, praise to God, sunlight and the air of day.

On the long way back to their home places through the summer days Dar Oakley and the Brother tried together to account for all that had happened in the time they had spent below; neither could quite remember it. But the little that one of them could summon up, when added to what the other was prompted to remember, and the dogmas the Brother held about what ought to take place there, became a story as they walked and talked.

Talked: Somehow being in the hole of the Singer and the land of Fox Cap had revealed to the Brother that Dar Oakley spoke a tongue of his own, one that the Brother could learn to understand, though not to speak; and as they went on day after day he did learn it, word by word, thought by thought. While they paddled in cool streams, lay in the sun half-asleep, looked for berries, they talked. Talked and talked.

How had the Brother escaped the judgment of the demon, Dar Oakley wanted to know. Well, the angel, blessed be she, had simply overruled the demon, and dressed the Brother in his priest’s garb again; and the demon in fury had flung the loathly burnt soul of the brigand at him, crying, Repent that!—and look, the black smuts of that were still on him.

“Oh,” said Dar Oakley.

It was toward evening on the third day that they parted, the Brother to go on to the Abbey now not far away, to confess all that he had done—as he now clearly remembered the angel had commanded him to do—and Dar Oakley to the night roost of his brothers and sisters. Both of them were apprehensive about their reception.

As he neared the old demesne, Dar Oakley detected Crows, all going one way, calling to others to follow, and he went after them. Soon he could hear calls from on ahead, where it seemed food had been found. The find was big, whatever it was. He’d likely find Va Thornhill there.

And there indeed he was. Atop something People had erected, made of lengths of wood and rope. People corpses were slung on it like killed Deer or Hares, ropes around their necks and binding their arms. Pretty far gone in decay. Crows upon them, searching for a grip in their filthy garb, putting their heads into breasts and bowels.

“Hello, Dar Oakley,” Va Thornhill called. “Where’ve you been?”

Dar Oakley didn’t answer that. He settled at a careful distance from the Bigger. “Your Wolves?” he asked.

“That’s right. As you see. There’ll be no more wealth to be had from them.”

“But,” Dar Oakley said, “here they are for you at least.”

Va Thornhill with a cold eye stepped sidewise along the gibbet toward Dar Oakley. “How true,” he said. He stepped closer. “You,” he said, “are one smart Crow.”

Dar Oakley moved off as many steps as Va Thornhill had come toward him, and his shoulder plumage rose. But the Bigger only laughed and lofted himself away, heavy with food.

Well, at least he hadn’t been driven off. Dar Oakley in the darkening day studied the dead brigands, eyeless and tongueless and burst-bellied. He was hungry. But— “You,” he said to one.

The Wolf-Bird brigand made no reply, though his single dangling eyeball turned toward the Crow. Dar Oakley spoke again, in the secret language of Ymr.

I know you, he said. I saw you, down there. Why are you out of Hell?

Why, this is Hell, said the lipless brigand; nor am I out of it.