Ka

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.

Worse: the storyteller said nothing about why Dar Oakley wanted to find the thing without a name. It wasn’t in order to live forever. It wasn’t for himself at all; he didn’t need it, and knew enough not to want it. He hadn’t been selfish, or sneaky, though you could never convince People that a Crow of whatever kind wasn’t both, all the time.

And Dar Oakley’d never dreamed a dream in all his several lives; he was sure he didn’t know what one was.

In an autumn here many seasons before this, Dar Oakley had found himself living among a flight of deeply black, supremely self-satisfied birds—Crows like the Crow who had looked down on him from a black-limbed tree on his last day alive. In fact he found himself to be one of them, as big and black as they, primaries long and strong, breast a sheen of colors.

He was looking into a still forest pool when he found himself, his reflected face ringed by fallen leaves: a Crow of this place. He seemed to be looked at by that face, as though by another Crow, who knew something about him that he didn’t; and in a flash of certainty he knew that in truth he wasn’t this Crow whose face he saw, or hadn’t always been. He had been another Crow in other times; and there were times when he had not been at all.

Whenever Dar Oakley finds himself—as by now he has done over and over—he finds more of himself than he found the time before.

As he looked into the still water at the strange Crow looking back, he remembered crossing the sea with the Terns, the Brother in Hell; he remembered Fox Cap; he remembered the clatter of the golden horsemen, and the archer who shot him. He remembered that so-black bird who had looked down on him in the wind and rain the last time he died; the trees around him now were just as brilliant as they had been on that day, but he didn’t think that this was then, or that these trees were those.

A Frog’s face broke the surface of the little pond he looked into, and shattered Dar Oakley’s reflection. With a long, strong bill he stabbed it, shook it, and swallowed it down.

And he remembered the Most Precious Thing: the reason he was here, the reason he had been anywhere he had been, and why in time to come he would be where he would be. Something about the cold Frog in his throat had brought it back: how he had taken that cold nothing in his bill, and fled with it, and lost it. Yet never parted from it, or ever could.

Nothing.

He heard Crows then, and lifted his head. Crows of his own lineage, far off, repeating calls from even farther off, making known that something of interest was up, all those of the lineage who heard should come see. And bearing his new burden of memory he rose up, calling his own call.

There hadn’t been lineages among the Crows where he had come from in Ka, but here there were, and he knew his own: his children and their children, their mothers and the mothers of their mothers, their mothers’ brothers and sisters too, all of them forming a stripe like a silver brook or stream seen from high up at evening, a stream bound to other streams from which it sprang or into which it flowed, all of them different but part of a whole that was distinct from Crows in general: this whole was a clan, his clan. There had not been clans either in the realm where (he now knew) he’d once lived, where he’d first been born.

He sensed as much as saw movement along the march of tall trees, Crows going toward the far callers somewhere daywise-of-billwise. After following for a time he caught up with one and called her name. She settled in a tall Maple and awaited him.

“Fighters returning from a raid,” she said. “Crow clan. Bringing captives.”

The People of that place and time belonged to clans and lineages too, clans named for beings other than themselves, beings they took as their sign or symbol: a thing Crows never did and couldn’t really understand. But there are hard and easy ways to get a living, and to be held in honor by People is one of the easy ones. Crows profited from the Crow clan, though Turtles got nothing from the Turtle clan except to have their shells turned into drums.

“How far?” Dar Oakley asked.

“Let’s go see,” said the other, whose name was Gray Feather; she was named for a hurt primary that after molt always grew in again gray, not black.

There hadn’t been names in the lands of Ka where Dar Oakley’d begun; Crows hadn’t possessed one each, not till Dar Oakley learned the language of People and found out about names. He remembered all that now, the story of it; he recalled it, which is to him as though he hears a call from a place he once inhabited and a being once himself, and answers.

The triangulating calls of the widespread lineage now were drawing the Crows to a People trail that wound along beside a fast-tumbling shallow river, sometimes closer to it, sometimes farther. As the People moved along it the calls followed, until Crows were in the trees along the way and keeping the People in sight. It was easy to tell which of the People were Crow clan and which were captives: the Crow clan wore necklaces, skirts, and leggings of Deer’s skin, black Crow feathers in their hair, where the captives were naked, filthy, hurt, and stumbling under heavy burdens. The clan fighters took notice of the Crows around them, and raised weapons to salute them: their own birds, coming to welcome them.

“There,” said Gray Feather to Dar Oakley, and leapt to a new branch to see better. “That one, look.”

One of the captives, slight and young it seemed, had fallen behind the others as the path rose steeply through a rocky place. He seemed to be hardly able to take steps, and had almost come to a halt when another captive higher up on the trail noticed him. Though burdened himself, he turned back toward the failing one. When the clan fighters saw this, that he might go help the younger one, they beat him back with their heavy clubs, nearly driving him to his knees. Two fighters went to the slighter captive, pulled off his burdens (peltry, skins, other captured stuff), and when he staggered and reached out for help to stand, a fighter lifted his club high and with a blow to his head killed him. Anyway he lay still. The Crows who saw it fell silent a moment. The fighter who’d struck the captive took a stone knife and cut at his head, and with a cry pulled off the hair and the skin and waved it aloft. The other fighters cheered. They kicked and shoved the body to the edge of the trail and off into the gullied rocks below; it rolled a distance, arms flopping will-lessly, and came to a stop, supine, the bleeding head downward. They loaded his burdens onto the tall captive, the one who had turned back perhaps to help; he bent under the weight, but bore it. The fighters pushed the captives back into line and started again up the path.

The Crows—who had expected all this—watched the fighters and the other captives pass one by one up the trail. One fighter cupped his hand by his mouth and gave a call in imitation of the Crow call that means Come see what’s here, and though most of the Crows couldn’t hear that in it, it didn’t matter: they were here, and they knew why. The dead captive’s eyes were open, his mouth open too and his tongue exposed. His many wounds bled freshly. The Crows had no rivals for the wealth they looked down on, and that was because of the long patronage of the Crow clan of the People, which they had elicited just by being the Crows that People wanted and needed.

Dar Oakley had taught them that, over time: how People could provide, if you understood them. And looking down this day at the thing caught in the rockfall below, he thought how he had learned those tricks and taught them to Crows in other times and places too, times and places and Crows that he’d forgotten till now.

“Hungry?” Gray Feather asked him.

“Never not,” Dar Oakley said.

A day later the slow-moving war party and its captives reached their home place. Dar Oakley had lingered at the cadaver of the dead captive for a time, gorging with the rest, but the Ravens had come, and then the Vultures, and he’d grown restless and filled with thoughts. He went on, and reached the Crow People village just when the walkers did. He flew up into a tall Pine, too far for them to see him, though he could see them. All the People—men, women, and children—were standing in two long lines before the palisade of tall stakes. When the fighters came in sight, they cheered and waved the sticks and the hide whips and weapons they held. The strutting fighters came in, pulling their captives with ropes tied around their necks. When the wealth they carried had been displayed and exclaimed over, the captives were tugged resisting into line. The gantlet—those two lines of People—wasn’t run, though run is the word you hear now: rather the captives were jerked along slowly by the ropes around their necks, so that everyone had a chance to strike at them or prod them with burning brands, on their backs, their arms and legs—but not their hands, or their faces. If a captive flinched, or staggered, or cried out, he’d be hit and whipped and burned all the more. Dar Oakley and the Crows of the lineage—those that didn’t shy from People or dislike Dogs or fire—had seen all of this done before: it was what happened when captives were brought back. The noise, People and Dogs and drums, was terrific.

That tall one, the one who on the trail had turned back to help the faltering one, walked with head high and eyes forward, seeming not to notice the crowd he passed through, shaking the blows from his body as though they were annoying insects. Dar Oakley saw now what he’d missed before: two fingers of one hand had recently been torn off, the stumps still bloody. When the People shouted at him, he responded to them, nothing Dar Oakley could hear, but spoken as though he were conversing with friends—it was a People way of speaking, though not while blood ran down backs and legs. Is that your kinswoman? Is that the hardest she can hit? Sometimes the People laughed at what he said, not in scorn (Dar Oakley can’t really describe in Crow words these subtleties of human talk that he sensed) but amused, as though he mocked one of them to amuse the rest. Still they went on thrashing him.

When they reached the open place in the palisade, one of the captives fell. The People descended on him, giving him the same kicks they gave their Dogs, beating and beating him with fierce and incomprehensible rage. When the others were taken within, this one was left, twisted and still.

Now the Crows—more had come in—took a real interest. The lineage of these Crows was numerous; winter was coming on, when food would be scarce. That was the sum of Crow thinking.

The Crows didn’t witness it—by then they were off asleep—but within the town the torture and humiliation of the naked captives went on through the night, with drumming and fires. Another of the captives died under it, or was killed as useless to his captors. But at least one survived: the one with two fingers torn away.

What the Crows couldn’t know and wouldn’t anyway have pondered was why People treated captives in the way they did. When later Dar Oakley learned the reason and tried to explain it to the Crows, they mostly didn’t believe him: those captives had been taken and brought back to be replacements for sons and brothers and sisters and children who had earlier been seized from the Crow clan in raids by other lineages, other clans, other Peoples. The captured ones were to become the ones who had been taken; the ones that the captives’ own clan had earlier killed.

The mourning families—the women, mostly—decided which of the captives would be spared to become People of their clan, and which would be killed and thrown to the Dogs, the Vultures, and the Crows. Which was greater, a woman’s longing for revenge, or her grief at her loss? Those who sustained the tortures well were mostly permitted to live.

The tall, proud one: after they’d done more to him, waiting for him to break, they ordered him to sing—insult after injury. He sang in his own language, and they yelled and mocked him, but they listened, too, and called for more. So he sang differently; he pointed at this one and that one, and the Crow People laughed at the ones who were made fun of by his words. Then his song changed again. The People listening grew quiet, and some of the women wept. At last the eldest of the women stood, and with a wave sent away the tormentors, the men and the children.

Then everything changed. Dar Oakley would be told of it later: how the captive was taken into the lodge and fed and cared for, his atrocious wounds treated. His new mother put food in his mouth with her own hands, bound his wounds with poultices. When he was healed he was within a new family, of a new clan, who fed him and loved him and taught him their speech and their ways. He could only lose that proffered love by resisting it, by holding on to what he had been, refusing the menial children’s tasks he must begin his new life with.

The family that this captive earned by his courage and his submission had once had a son taken in a raid by others from elsewhere; that son might be dead or he might not be, but he was lost to them. Now they had a son again, a son restored, just as beautiful, and wiser; a son who would in time lose the knowledge that he had ever been anyone else.

That was why the captives were treated as they were: in the madness of torture they’d lose every loyalty, however deep, every memory of home they had; die as themselves so that new selves could be made, selves of this place, this lineage.

Well, Dar Oakley knew; Dar Oakley understood.

For a sign, they cut off one of his ears, the right ear that the first son had once lost in a fight. From then on their name for him was One Ear, as it had been the name of the first.

When later he told Dar Oakley this story, he’d flick the stub of the ear with one of the remaining fingers of his right hand, and grin.

Because of those mangled fingers, he could never be much of a weapon wielder; but tall and brave and cool though he was, he had little interest in fighting anyway. He’d be a singer of songs and a storyteller. Among the hundreds of stories he could tell were ones he’d heard as a child in his first family, though he never revealed that. And one—the story of a Crow who went in search of Nothing—was one he’d learn from Dar Oakley. Dar Oakley, on his branch up above the children and the elders, would listen to it told, told again and changed, and he would not always know where the story ceased and he began, whether he heard it in Ka or acted it in Ymr.

That first winter after Dar Oakley found himself was a hard one. It began before the leaves fell and piled snow on snow that never melted. Dar Oakley and Gray Feather in the shelter of a dense Pine kept watch on the People trails, waiting for the hunters on their wide Bear-feet to come crossing over the snow, perhaps pulling a toboggan and a dead Moose the Crows might get something of. They sat together motionless, saving energy.

“What was his name?” Dar Oakley asked. It was in this season that Gray Feather’s mate had been lost.

“Darkwood,” she said. “It was the name his mother had, and others of his family.”

That was a difference here from the lands where Dar Oakley had first thought of names. There, every Crow had had his own. Here Gray Feather’s daughters had young with her name—Grayfeather—though they had no gray feather at all.

“I think,” she said, “if there is a name, a lost Crow is easier to remember.”

“I know,” he said. And yet it seemed to him that it might be as true to say that names make it easier to forget: the name remains and the rest is lost.

Snow drifted noiselessly through the Pine branches.

“Why do we have them, anyway?” Dar Oakley asked. “Names. Who thought of that?” He said it just to keep himself from telling his own tale, which would have set him apart from Gray Feather, from these Crows, his clan, whether they believed his story or didn’t, a story from elsewhere and far away.

“Ask the Ravens,” Gray Feather said. “It’s said they know more about Crows than Crows themselves know.”

“Look,” Dar Oakley said. Below, seeming black as Bears against the snow, Crow People hunters came tugging an empty sled.

The hard freezes of that winter cracked the rocks above the trail the People took along the river, and when heavy rains fell in spring, the split granite loosened and slid down over the trail and the slope below. Mud covered the bare bones of the captive that in autumn the Crows and others had eaten. All this the overwintering Crows observed. Then on a green-flecked day Dar Oakley on his rounds came upon the captive who had become one of the Crow clan, there at that spot. He climbed stones, he prodded the ground with a digging stick here and there. He stopped, baffled, and sat unmoving, head low.

Dar Oakley knew what he wanted, and where it was. He flew near. There was no reason not to help.

First he had to get this one’s attention, the one now called One Ear. It might be that he was Crow clan now, but he hadn’t yet caught the trick of observing Crows and being guided by them. Dar Oakley took a low branch and called; he settled lower, on a rock above the trail. At last One Ear saw that he was being spoken to, and stood. Dar Oakley flew farther on—One Ear hadn’t been searching in the right place. He stopped now and then and waited for One Ear to clamber over the rocks. He alighted finally at the place where a pale bone protruded from the rubble, though he didn’t choose to remain there when One Ear saw and ran stumbling to the place. He watched instead from afar, going off now and then in search of food, returning to see that One Ear had gathered bones, more bones each time, some broken, strung with hard tendon and bearing scraps of black flesh: many but not all of the bones that had held that captive together. No longer useful for that or for anything.

What was it People wanted with bones? Had he known once and forgotten? One Ear squatting beside these had begun to sing; he took from his pouch some powdery stuff and with his spit made a paste that he drew over his cheeks in broad black stripes. He placed the bones in a Deer-skin he must have brought just for this, and put in other things, a stone knife, a belt of beads, dried meats. Then, still singing, he lifted it all and went upward away from the trail and a long way into the forest, to where stones had been piled—it was clear to Dar Oakley that they had been piled and had not gathered there by chance or the stones’ own will. One Ear laid the bones down, and pushed aside stones to reveal a hollow in the earth. With great tenderness, as though laying a child in its bed, he put the Deer-skin there.

He rolled the stones again over it, his cache—but why? No one would seek it out to eat it now—and he sat in silence there beside it. Dar Oakley was sure no one of the Crow clan of the People knew of this deed or this place, or ever was to know.

He began to speak then, words in a language Dar Oakley hadn’t heard before—he understood some of the Crow clan’s language, but this was different. And yet as One Ear spoke, and the spring evening closed around and the last of the melting snow breathed in the Hemlocks, Dar Oakley felt drawn once more into that realm Ymr where he had used to go. He remembered bones: the bones of the Saint that had spoken to him in the Brothers’ oratory, the bones that Fox Cap and her People had brought back to put in the houses made for them alone. Fox Cap’s own bones, cleaned and lying under the sun, her and not her.

One Ear raised his face to the sky, and saw Dar Oakley.

“Do you know Crow People words?” he asked. “I’ll tell you a story.”

And he did.

These bones, he said, were the bones of his brother. The two of them were born together, like two birds in a nest, or like the Good Son and the Bad Son who in the beginning made the world the way it is. They were unalike: his brother had been small and not strong, but he followed his bigger brother everywhere, and learned all the skills of fighting and hunting. When the Crow clan raiders surprised One Ear’s band returning to their home place from a hunt with skins and meat, his twin brother attacked them, first in the fight; when he was overcome, One Ear tried to rescue him, and was taken himself.

He told how this brother had died on the trail in this place, which Dar Oakley knew about, though he listened with care anyway.

Then One Ear rose from where he sat by the stones, and made his way down to the river. He removed his Deer-skin skirt and leggings and his feathers and necklaces. He walked into the water and sat to lave himself, wash the black from his face. He spoke softly in that language Dar Oakley didn’t know. When he was done, he stood and shook the last drops from his fingers.

“Now he’s not scattered,” he said in Crow-clan words. “Now he rests. Now he can be forgotten.”

Dar Oakley never afterward heard One Ear speak a word in the language he was born to, only the language of the Crow People. Yet from that day One Ear recognized Dar Oakley when he was near, welcomed him and gave him scraps and watched him. It was as though with Dar Oakley nearby, he could have his old self and not be in danger from it: his old self, kept in a Crow. The other People watched him greet Dar Oakley or summon him from hiding, and acknowledged his special power. They didn’t know that the two talked together when alone, in the way Dar Oakley had talked so long before with Fox Cap: One Ear in the People’s language, Dar Oakley in the Crows’.

People can have many names, or they could then: they shed one and gain another, or they have a name in one place and a different name elsewhere; a name they give and a name they keep. Dar Oakley’s name for One Ear was Hider; his name for Dar Oakley was Seeker.

“The Beaver said, ‘Old Turtle lives at the bottom of the Beautiful Lake of the North. He is the oldest being there is, and therefore the wisest. Also his ancestor was the being on whose back the world was made. Many say it was the Muskrat that piled up dirt on the Turtle’s back to make the world, but the Beavers say it was the Beaver.’ ”

The People were on the yearly journey to the Dawn Land, and they were carrying Beaver pelts for trading, so they’d asked One Ear for a story with a Beaver in it. They told stories to allay their fears: all through this part of the world, peace was supposed to hold, councils had made agreements, and female elders had ratified them. But you couldn’t be certain. Peltry was easier to get by robbing than by hunting.

“The Beautiful Lake was far away, and the journey was long,” One Ear said. He had told all his stories many times, making the different voices, imitating the waddle of the Beaver and the bobbing of the Crow so exactly that the listeners could hardly keep from laughing. If they’d been at home he’d have made rain fall (seeds in a long gourd) or played the voices of birds on his pipe.

“When they came to the Beautiful Lake, the Crow thought it must be the water that surrounds the earth on all sides, but the Beaver said no, it was just a big lake. Old Turtle’s home lay deep down in the middle of it. So the Beaver took mud and stopped up the Crow’s nostrils, and she took clay and stopped up the Crow’s ears, and telling him to keep his eyes tight shut, she dove with him to the bottom of the lake and Old Turtle’s house.

“Old Turtle didn’t want to come out—he never does—but the Beaver called to him that they had come to get wisdom, and had brought gifts. And after a while Old Turtle let them in. You know how slow the Turtle is—just like his clan, ha-ha—but Old Turtle’s even slower because he thinks so much.”

The long summer day was ending. The river flats where the loaded canoes were drawn up shone in the last light. Dar Oakley knew the story would go on into the darkness, but he’d sleep. After all, he knew the tale, even the tale as One Ear told it: how when the Beaver’s gifts had been shown and Old Turtle had fingered them approvingly, and the tobacco the Beaver brought had been smoked, it was time for Dar Oakley to tell his dream and ask his question.

“Now, Old Turtle knew right away what it meant to go in search of nothing. He’d gone on that search himself, in a time back at the beginning of the world when he was young. Had he found nothing? No, he hadn’t, but he’d found something like it. As for finding nothing itself, he told them, none of us will, because it’s not for the likes of us.

“Who is it for, then? the Beaver wanted to know, and Old Turtle said, People. People want nothing, they want it more than anything, and they believe it belongs to them. They have never found it, or when they have found it they right away lose it again. And yet People have had nothing in their possession all along. At least a kind of People have had nothing in their possession.

“The Small Ugly People! the Beaver said, and slapped her tail on Old Turtle’s floor. The Crow, however, had never heard of such beings.

“Well, they’re small, said the Beaver, though not as small as a Chipmunk.

“They have narrow, hairy faces, said Old Turtle. But not as hairy as a Bear’s.

“They are ugly, said the Beaver, but not as ugly as a Toad.

“They hate big People, and stay far from their dwellings.

“Yet they love big People, and give them gifts so the People will love them.

“The Small Ugly People may give you nothing, said Old Turtle to the Crow. But they will want something in return.

“How will I find these Small Ugly People? the Crow asked.

“There is a Crow who knows of them, said Old Turtle. This Crow is the oldest Crow of this world, in the tallest tree of this world. You must seek and find that bird, and ask for her help. And now, he said, it is time for me to go back to sleep. And he clambered up onto his sleeping mat and drew his wrinkled old head into his shell.”

But no, no, it wasn’t like that, it was no such thing as that—down under the great lake to smoke a pipe with a Turtle—absurd! And yet though there was no Turtle in Dar Oakley’s story, there really were Small Ugly People, and advice from Ravens; Dar Oakley did in time travel to that lake, the one the People call Beautiful, and he went in search of nothing he knew of, toward the oldest Crow of this world: and this was the story that piece by piece One Ear had learned from him, and changed to suit himself.

It began the summer when he and One Ear first began to speak together, and One Ear came to know something of Dar Oakley’s history. Dar Oakley had no other business that summer—in spring he and Gray Feather had thought to dance that old dance, act that act, but something, maybe the weight of old losses, had kept them from it. Anyway he was alone with only his own mouth to feed.

He’d noticed, on his rounds through the realms of People and others, a pair of Ravens who seemed to take an interest in him. There were reasons a Raven might want to note the movements of a Crow; often the dense Crow clans and their constant here-I-am, there-you-are conversing brought Crows to big kills first, which the larger and more imperious Ravens following them could then dominate. But no—these Ravens weren’t watching Crows. They were watching him.

Then as he sat high in his Oak in the hot afternoon, vaguely hearing voices and thinking of nothing, he felt wings around him, and found the two Ravens, one on either side, regarding him.

“Masters,” Dar Oakley said, and becked gravely. It was the way Ravens were addressed, he seemed to recall, long ago and elsewhere. The Ravens exchanged a look and a sound at that—it might have been a laugh.

“You are,” one said, “Dar of Oak by Lea.”

“That’s your gname,” croaked the other.

“Well, yes,” Dar Oakley said, startled that Ravens, who would take no interest in a particular Crow unless it could do them some good, should know such a thing. Like all Crows, Dar Oakley knew the speech of Ravens; it was like his own, but grave and harsh.

“We have been sent in search of you,” one of them said. Dar Oakley thought they were a mated pair, though it was hard for a Crow to know for sure. “We have had to speak to many Crows.”

“Oh,” Dar Oakley said. “I’m sorry. But why . . .”

“Don’t question,” the larger one (female?) said. “We have come only to summon or send you.”

“Summon or send me where?”

“To marges of great lake of gnorth,” said the other, who Dar Oakley thought was the male. “To Crow of that place, who wishes Crow of your gname to come before her.”

“She does?”

The two Ravens now seemed to have exhausted their store of diplomacy, and flitted, ready to be off. “Will you go?” one asked, and the other looked skyward and murmured, “We would not want to have come so far for gnothing.”

“Masters!” Dar Oakley cried. “I’ll do what you say. But how will I find this Crow?”

“Crows said to us only this: she is oldest of all Crows, one with whom Crows of this world began.”

“Oh. Oh?”

“Summer is old, Crow. Better be gone.”

“But why,” Dar Oakley asked, “would Crows ask you, you Ravens, to find me?”

The two Ravens shared a look, as though pondering whether to tell a tale or not. Then the female said:

“Once, in a time not now, this oldest Crow did great thing for Hravens. A time that no Hraven or Crow can now remember.”

“Is said to have happened when that clan of Crows first came into this country,” the female said, and the haws slid over her eyes, as though her own words put her to sleep. “When these tallest trees were sprouts on forest floor. And tall trees now dead and rotted were saplings.”

“For this,” the other whispered, “Hravens have always been ready to do certain services for Crows.”

“Certain small services. At certain times. If convenient.”

“But what was it,” Dar Oakley asked, “that that Crow did for Ravens?”

“Hravens have forgot what Crow did,” the male Raven said.

“But obligation remains,” said the female, and lifted her shoulders in a shrug.

The two Ravens turned then, and fell heavily from the branch they sat on, and set off without farewell.

“But how will I know this Crow?” Dar Oakley called after them. “What is her name?”

“We know no gname,” growled the female.

“We have not ever seen her,” the other called.

“Perhaps never was such Crow.”

And they were gone.

Dar Oakley thought, No one in this world knows that name of mine: no one.

“For every being there is an oldest one,” One Ear told Dar Oakley. “It was with that oldest one that the kind began: the first to be what that kind is. The first being with sharp needles on its back instead of fur or hair. The first with teeth strong enough to bring down trees. And believe it—that first and oldest being never dies, for if it dies, the kind dies too. There are then no Porcupines, no Beavers.”

“For People, too?” Dar Oakley asked.

“Oh yes. Before there were People, there was one man and one woman in the Sky World. They had a daughter, and the daughter had two sons, the Good Son and the Bad Son. Then it went on until the world was finished, and People were everywhere People can be. And those first ones are still there at the beginning, and also now.”

Weren’t all People like that? Dar Oakley thought. Wasn’t it how things were in Ymr? They had their first ones who’d died long ago and never died, they had their kings hidden in the hollow hills. They had their angels and Saints in the world above and others in the world below. He’d known all this long ago and knew it now again. But were there such beings in Ka, and could they be sought and seen? If there were such a Crow as the one who’d sent those Ravens to him, that Crow wouldn’t be just a thought, or what People called a dream. No, if there were such a being in Ka, it would be just one more of the things-that-are. In Ka, there aren’t any other kinds of things.

“Well, yes,” Gray Feather said to him. “I’ve heard there is an oldest Crow still living. A Crow that Crows began with.”

A chilly billwise breeze lifted Dar Oakley’s back feathers. He’d lingered, unable to make up his mind to go; he’d only pondered and put questions to himself and others. But it was autumn now, late to be staying.

“My mate, Rin Darkwood,” Gray Feather said. “He was born a Crow of another clan, a clan whose marches run up billwise to a great lake, he told me. He said that the oldest Crow lived somewhere in those lands. He said he knew a Crow who knew a Crow who knew.”

“Yes,” Dar Oakley said. “That’s what I’ll do. Find a Crow who knows a Crow who knows a Crow.”

Gray Feather laughed. The world was so rich now, so full. “Go now while it’s still warm in the sun,” she said.

“I could be gone long,” Dar Oakley said. “Never return.”

“I won’t forget you,” Gray Feather said.

“No? Because I, because of how you and I—”

“No,” she said, and lifted wings to go. “Because you have a name.”

He watched her out of sight. Then he dropped from the branch he’d shared with her, fell into the sweet air, stopped his fall with a wing beat, and pointed himself billwise.

Through the days he traveled, flying and resting in the slow Crow way, over lands not very different from those he knew. People towns and hamlets went by under him in his going over them; he looked down on the shaggy tops of their lodges, the black heads of women and the smaller black heads of their naked children, which sometimes turned upward and showed paler faces, hands pointing at his passage. Beyond their palisades, the long stretches of Maize-plants turning yellow—the Crows of this North hadn’t yet learned to live on it—and vines of squash and beans growing up and clinging around them. These passed. Then groves of tall nut trees, Beech and Hickory and Chestnut, the ground around littered with the mast that many beings lived on, People too; Dar Oakley flew too high above the spreading limbs to see any gatherers. The leaves were turning.

Farther North the People had begun the autumn burn, the low grasses and shrubbery set alight to keep the ways open, and to make the grass and berries come in sweeter in the spring, and so bring in Deer and Bison. And also just because People loved fire. Beneath him gray smoke like dense low clouds lay over stripes and sparkles of red like sunsets, as if the sky lay on the ground. Most beings feared fire and ran from it, and so People could use fire to force them to go where they could be caught. Many Crows, though, loved smoke, hopped and flew along the lines of the burn, wings cupped as though to clothe themselves in smoke, dizzy with it or stoned by it. Dar Oakley, a stranger, couldn’t stop to join them, might not be welcome. Aloft he smelled the sweet-acrid smoke, followed the silver rivers winding through the blackened woods. A line of canoes, there. He wondered if People had once thought of a thing that would do all that fire does, and then worked out how to create it, as they had made weapons and houses; or if they’d come upon fire in the world, tamed it over time and made it do what they wanted when they wanted it, as they had Maize, or Dogs.

Through all this he didn’t seek. He had no name to ask for or to call, no qualities to look for—what would the oldest Crow look like? He was among Crows who likely didn’t want him there, and so he kept to himself; there was food in plenty, and he had no reason to contest with any Crow.

He didn’t seek, but he was aware—and the farther billwise he went, the more he felt it—that he was sought. Single Crows and pairs would notice him, and go away without a call of inquiry. Or they’d follow far off, thinking that they weren’t seen.

And all the while a strange notion, an impossible idea, was forming inside him, forming as a spring nest is formed of many things from here and there, growing stronger.

It was turning cold when he reached what was surely the great lake that the People called Beautiful. The day was dark and a sharp wind raised whitecaps on the stone-gray surface; white-winged birds sailed over it, and Dar Oakley did think of the sea he’d crossed, whether this could be some part of it.

Then Crows began to come around him in numbers, smooth slim birds blacker than the obsidian chips Crows love and hide. Word must have passed from Crow to Crow that the one they awaited had come: himself. Hard to believe that was what the calls and black eyes turned to him meant, but it seemed to be so. Follow, they said. That was clear enough. The Crows around him passed by and over him, settled, waited for him to catch up, then took up the guiding as other Crows went on ahead. Their calls were neither welcoming nor hostile, and Dar Oakley kept still.

How was it he knew that a great smooth Beech, at whose foot masses of nuts had fallen, was where he was being taken? Like Bees streaming all together toward the entrance to their hive, the Crows flew unerringly to it. On a high branch alone a Crow sat, and the incoming Crows alighted on lower branches; but Dar Oakley, as though he knew for sure he was meant to, took a seat there beside that Crow, a female big and glistening in many iridescent shades.

“Hello, Kits,” he said.

She raised her head to him without a beck. “Long time since I’ve been called by that name,” she said. “Hello, Dar Oakley.”

“The same,” he said. “The same for me, Kits. A long time.”

Once, in the time when they were mated, in that other world elsewhere, Kits had told him that if a Crow flew far enough daywise—or darkwise, it was the same either way, she said—then after a long time, many years, that Crow would come back to the very place it had started from. The world, which seems to go on in plains and mountains forever without any end, is really all curved: like the trunk of a great tree, maybe, she’d said. And like a Tit or any small bird searching a trunk’s bark for food, you could go right around the trunk of the tree of the world and return to where you started.

She’d said, You know it to be so. The way the earth rolls up over the horizon as you fly toward it and look from high, high up? It’s so, it does.

Dar Oakley, who’d tried to believe this though he could barely understand it, had said that even if it were so, and the world was like the trunk of a tree and so on, no Crow could ever live so long. And how could she know such a thing unless she had circled that world-tree herself, and come back to where she started from? Which she could not have done in a Crow’s lifetime.

She’d given him a mocking look and didn’t answer. And yet without any good reason he’d come to believe that she had had life enough.

“Then tell me,” he said to her now. “By what way did you come around to this place, this lake, this Beech? Darkwise, or daywise? Did you cross the sea? I did, Kits, and died.”

“I never died,” she said. “I came from darkwise, going into daywise, all over land. And here we are, you from one way, I from the other, side by side. Again.”

That was true: it was she, and he was here beside her. Like two little pecking birds circling a tree trunk in opposite directions, they’d come together as far from where each had started as they could go, and something he’d lost forever was returned to him, which was stranger by far than the losing of it. Which had been strange enough.

“Kits,” he said. “When we parted that last time. When I set out with the red-haired People woman on that journey that I shouldn’t have taken.” She nodded, the cooler and more skeptical of her two eyes turned on him. “You said you might not be there still when I came back; that lots could happen, we might not meet again. And I said to you, ‘You and I, Kits. For life.’ And you said, ‘Life is short.’ ”

She laughed, as though she now remembered that, and hadn’t till just then. “Well,” she said. “For some.”

“You are the oldest of all the Crows,” he said. “You were old when we mated, when we had young; when we carried the dead of those People to their right lands, and ate the flesh they left behind. You were old as old. I knew it then. I just—I didn’t know how to know it. But I did.”

“You,” she said, “are one smart Crow.”

“How did you know I was nearby here, and you could find me?” he asked. “Who in this country spoke my name to you?”

“Your name?”

“Ravens came to me, and they knew my name. They said they came from you.”

“No one ever spoke your name to me,” she said. “But I heard there was a Crow, of a lineage some days away, who taught Crows that the People could provide.”

“Provide?”

“That the greatest wealth for Crows was dead People, and to be friends with People, you must take part in their deaths; that’s how you get that wealth. I thought, I know that Crow; I know that old deceit.”

“No deceit,” Dar Oakley said.

“I sent messengers, daywise, darkwise, to say your name everywhere, and find who answered to it. That was many seasons past. I’ve waited.”

Messengers? Dar Oakley looked down the Beech where he and she sat. The crowd of Crows who’d ushered him here were staying below, at a distance, and yet keeping a watch, too, and listening. And he thought: Servitors. That’s what they were, her Servitors. He’d never known a Crow with more than one, or rarely two: a helper, feeder of young, sometime lover but not mate. His mother’s, long ago. If these sleek silent Crows were Servitors, then Kits had more Servitors than he could count. Had they, too, lived from then till now, only adding to their number? And himself, was he one?

“Well here I am,” he said. “Now tell me. What is it you wanted from me?”

She said nothing for a long time. He had begun to see that, beautiful and strong as she was, she was old, old in subtle ways: the sockets of her eyes were deep, the feathers of her head were thin. Her toes were long and twisted, like ancient vines.

“Look there,” she said. “The sun’s low; the days are growing shorter. The lineage will be gathering. Stay here by me, Dar Oakley, and when it’s morning I’ll answer you.”

Think of a Crow that goes on producing young each spring for a thousand years. Her children engender grandchildren for her, and those grandchildren great-grandchildren, and on and on even as she herself has more daughters and sons. At the end of those centuries how many direct descendants could she have? How large a flock that called her its mother or queen? Not all of them have followed her, surely; tens of thousands could have gone away, or been left behind as her flock migrated, spread out widely and mated with other populations and were alienated.

A thousand years? More, surely—I don’t know how many more; I don’t have facts to calculate with. Crows don’t count in thousands, or even in tens; Dar Oakley ceases to speak when I try to ask him to imagine how long it’s been, how long since he was born, how long she can have lived and crossed the world.

Why did she cross the world?

Was she in fact born among the American Crows, Corvus brachyrhyncos, and only after long years found her way west to live among the Eurasian Crows, Corvus corone? She was always different from them, Dar Oakley’s kind. Or was she born in the Old World, a sport, a genetic oddity, and were all the Crows of America her offspring, and looked like her? After a thousand generations, they’d have overcome any rivals, just by the numbers of them, and formed a species of their own.

Or maybe she was a plain Crow of Dar Oakley’s kind, who over time moved east across the world and finally over the ice bridge to the Western lands, following nomads; and in that time her shape and look changed, the iridescence of her plumage, the pitch of her call, just from living so long among the generations of Crows she met and mated with, before she turned back for some reason—restlessness, exile—to the lands where she was born, to find a mate in Dar Oakley.

How many mates before, how many since? How many were lost, died, grew old and failed, were caught and eaten, gone, never seen again? How often was she the one lost, though never lost to herself?

“You never died?” Dar Oakley asked her. “In all that time?”

“No.”

“But there are so many ways to die.”

“I’m not a hothead like you,” she said. “I made friends who helped me, watched me; mates who stayed by me.”

He dipped his head a little at that, and looked away.

Morning had come. Together they walked the ground, kicked up the yellow withering leaves and with their bills knocked on the fallen Beechnuts they found to get the meat; they walked the rocky lakeshore, picked at this and that. Always one Servitor or another watched them from not far off. Otherwise it was as it had been, only with everything different.

“So now tell me, Kits—you said you would. Why have you brought me here? And how is it that you can be here, so far away from where we were, and so long after?”

“Well, and how is it that you are, dear Crow?” she said. “Here among the living Crows, I mean; here in this season of the world.”

For a long moment he couldn’t remember; it was as though he’d suddenly gone blind. He couldn’t remember how he could be here, or what had happened between that time and now, or who he’d been before.

“I went into Ymr,” he said then. “I stole a thing there, the Most Precious Thing, and though I right away lost it, I have it still.”

“Ymr,” said Kits, as though she knew the word or the name and yet didn’t know it: the way we speak the name of something when we want someone to keep talking about it.

“Ymr,” Dar Oakley said. “It’s the realm where what People think is true is true.”

She laughed. “There is no true,” she said. “Only what happened, after it has.” She lifted her ashy head; her bill was parted, her eye was dry. “I stole it too,” she said.

“You stole it? From what being, where?”

“From around the neck of a People child. In another land far from here.” She stooped to peck at something, discarded it. “A little stone. I wanted it and I took it.”

“And did it,” Dar Oakley said, remembering suddenly, “speak to you?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

A little stone, strung on a red cord around a People child’s fat neck. A thing she couldn’t keep from looking at and spying on. Did it catch the light like a chip of quartz, was it gold, or worked silver? No, it wasn’t. It was a plain little yellow-gray stone, but when the baby sat in the dirt or sucked at its mother’s breast, the stone seemed to glow and fade, as though restless; it seemed to be seeking escape—how could that be?

So she stole it. It was nothing; why should the child have it, why would People miss it? She settled on the child’s stomach as it slept in the sun, and with a quick bite she tore the bead from the string and was away, hearing the child wail and the mother cry out below.

She found a hiding place for it, and when that place seemed insecure, she found another—as any Crow would do. She went often to visit it, look at it with this eye and then with that, turn and turn it, and yes, it was as though she heard it speak or sob in words she didn’t know, for she’d take it up in her bill to comfort or soothe it somehow.

On a day when she was holding it that way, she looked up to see a People woman staring at her. A People woman, but not like others: tiny, squat, toadlike. How could it have snuck up on her, a Crow, without her noticing? The woman crept forward, holding out her hand with a grasping motion, eyes fixed on Kits. It was clear what she wanted, but not why. Kits hopped back, somehow unable to fly—the little woman’s stare held her to the ground. But when the creature came close enough to leap swiftly for her, Kits was so startled that she snapped her bill—and the little stone went down her throat.

She rose up, horrified, shrieking, transformed (though she didn’t know, and for a long time wouldn’t know, just how transformed). The small being raised a finger, longer than it ought to have been, and pointed at Kits, and bared its stubs of teeth. Kits flew, and the little someone ran after her, faster than Kits would have thought it could, reaching up its long arms and twiggy fingers as though it could take hold of her. And Kits knew: That thing around the child’s neck was hers, and she wants it back. She wants it back as much as I want to keep it. I will never give it to her and she will never cease to seek it from me.

That day she began to leave that country and People. But she carried the stone with her, inside her, and never passed it. And the Small People, whose stone it was, followed after. Whatever lands Kits came to, wherever she and a mate would settle, after a time the Small People would begin to appear. The thing she had stolen, that gave her this length of life, was the same thing that keeps Small People in existence forever—Kits was certain of that. And for forever they followed her—or followed Crows, because they couldn’t tell which bird it was who’d robbed them.

“From that day to this,” Kits said. “From then until now.”

“No,” Dar Oakley said, appalled. “Not possible.”

“They can be found, around here, not so far away.”

“But Kits,” he said. “Two Crows? Each given the one thing People most want, or stealing it right out from under them? Then each finding the other, after who knows how long?”

“Why not?” she said. “There could be many of us. We could be common.” She had that stance, that stance that said, Don’t believe me when I say this, even if I’m telling you it’s so.

“Many?”

“As many as there are ways to find that thing and get it. It’s ours; it’s meant for us.”

“We stole it, Kits. From them, from People. Both you and I.”

“Don’t they say that about everything we have or get? Thieves: Isn’t that who we are to them?”

Dar Oakley flitted, resettled his wings, shook his head and bill in confusion.

“Well, tell me this, Dar Oakley,” Kits said. “Who did you steal it from in Ymr, that precious People thing?”

This Dar Oakley could see vividly, as though he were there again, as though Kits’s question flung him there: to the top of the tallest Beech—yes!—and the house where the black Dog and the black Pig kept watch. The house of the Crow of that world.

He’d stolen the Most Precious Thing from a Crow.

“It’s not for them, Dar Oakley,” Kits said, “that thing. Not People big or small. No matter who of their kind thinks it is. The story of it may be, but not the thing. The thing’s for us. It was and is. And this is why I sent for you to come.”

The sun had gone to the West again, and the long autumn evening was thickening.

“I’m dying, Dar Oakley,” Kits said. “Dying for good. And there’s only one thing that can be done for me. You must go into the . . . realm, did you call it, that realm of Small People from whom I stole the stone of life everlasting. And steal it for me again.”

“Never make fun of the Small Ugly People,” One Ear told the Crow clan children and others gathered around him. “Never laugh at them. They know they’re ugly and they’re ashamed of it, but they can’t change it. They hear better than any other being, and they’ll know you mocked them. They’ll hide from you ever after, and you won’t find them even when they could do you some good.

“They’re water-folk, and they hide in streams; when they choose to they can appear to be Otters. If you see Otters sliding on their mudslides in spring and you keep still, you can sometimes hear them talking as Otters never talk. But if you startle them, they will swim down to a country of their own below the water.

“Anyway, some say that. Some say they prefer caves and deep fissures in the rocks, where they keep things precious to themselves but useless to others. Or maybe they build stone houses—piling stones on stones to make a small round lodge no bigger than a hornet’s nest. They love stones, and roll them around in the night for reasons only they know—have you ever heard them? Maybe it’s a game. At night when you hear a Nighthawk, look for them. Sometimes you’ll think you hear the whine of a Dragonfly, but not see one—that’s them too.

“They live very long lives, and almost never have sons and daughters, so the number of them always stays the same. They love children, though, and sometimes they’ll come to women in childbirth. Now listen. A long time ago there was a boy whose mother was in labor and the baby wouldn’t appear, and it looked like both would die. The boy went out into the night forest and when he heard the Nighthawk call, he begged for the help of the Small People for his mother. No answer came, but as he went back to his lodge he felt that he was followed. Rather than go into the lodge, he hid by the door, and after a time he saw a tiny woman go in to where his mother lay. He knew he mustn’t look, but through a chink in the wall he saw the Small Ugly woman kneeling between his mother’s legs and speaking softly and urgently into her, and to the baby inside, and after a time it appeared. It was dead, with the cord wrapped around its neck. The Small Ugly woman freed the baby, and she tied a string around its neck where the cord had been, and on the string was a little bead: a small, ugly, discolored stone. The baby opened its eyes at that, and cried.

“The little woman put the baby—almost as big as she was!—to the mother’s breast, and whispered in her ear, and though the words were strange to her, the mother knew what she had been told: Never ever take the stone from around the baby’s neck; for as long as it remains, the child will live and grow.

“It was so. The child grew fat and strong, until one day she was sitting in the sun with her brother and a Crow came near. You know that Crows love things that catch the sun and glitter. Before the brother could chase it away, the Crow had snatched the bead and flown away.

“When the boy told his mother, she was grief-stricken, and sickened with fear. That night when the moon was risen the boy took her to where he had spoken to the Small Ugly People, and begged for the little woman to come help.

“Not until the moon was down did the boy and his mother hear words spoken. They saw no one, but they were sure it was the voice of the Small Ugly woman. They were told that the child would do well and grow, but it was too bad the stone was stolen, because as long as the child wore it she would never die. Now that it was gone, she would live only as long as it was her nature to live.

“Well, the woman cried happily at that, and thanked and thanked the Small Ugly woman. With good luck and care, her child, who should have died at birth, would live to have children of her own, and grandchildren, and be loved and cared for in her age, and one day she’d lie down and die and go to a far world where her own mothers waited for her; and who could want more than that?

“No more was said, but in the darkness they heard a tiny weeping, as soft as the whine of a Dragonfly at your ear.

“That was very long ago in another country, and for sure the mother and her son, and the child and all her children, have lived their lives and died since then. But maybe that Crow who stole the Small Ugly People’s stone is still alive.”

“No,” Dar Oakley said. There was a murmur around him—the Servitors, who were never far, had heard Kits too, and were gathering, solicitous.

“Yes, I’m dying,” she said, “and all along I have been, like every other Crow.” She lifted her wings, as though to show how ragged they were, and they were. “I’ll die. Not now, not this morning or this season, but not never.”

“I’ve died,” Dar Oakley said. “I’m here still.”

“It’s not the same,” she said. “One day like me you’ll begin to die for good, no matter how long it takes before you do. You’ll live so long you’ll think your life’s forever, and you’ll call it forever, but it’s not. You’ll see.”

“I don’t care,” he said. He was beside her, with her, and he felt as deathless as any youth. “It’s enough.”

“Can you have enough life?” she said.

“You can’t have more.” He came to groom her, took the feathers of her head in his bill one by one. “Not more than all.”

But she said to him as he tended her: What if you could? What if there was a way that a Crow could have more, could grow backward, start again? Because there wasn’t just one of the stones; there had to be more, she knew it, she didn’t know how many, maybe one for each of the Small People, because they seemed to live so long; she’d seen and been cursed at by the same ones, the same horrid little ones, for time out of mind, in every place she’d run to. One stone had certainly been given away: the one she stole. So if he went to them, he might be able to get another. And with another, a Crow might begin again.

“How do you know that?” Dar Oakley asked. “How do you know there’s another?”

“Because you touched one yourself.”

“Did I?”

“Just say you’ll do it. When spring comes, you’ll go and find them, and do this. I’ll tell you how. I’ll tell you all I know.”

It had begun to snow: they hadn’t noticed. Winter, come early so far North.

“Remember when we courted?” he said. “You used to demand that I do impossible things. Knock a Dog on the forehead and get away. Take food from an Eagle’s nest. Then you’d make fun of me when I refused, or failed.”

Of course she remembered; he saw it in her stance. “This isn’t impossible,” she said. “It’s not. It’s what I want.”

He knew how it would be: he would go into Ymr, and the farther in he went, the farther there would be to go. It was never the same place twice, and the Thing wouldn’t be the same thing, nor how to get it. It was a stone once, but now it’s a coat like People wear or it’s a bone belonging to no known being or it’s nothing at all though it talks to you and tells you lies. Once there you have to get it, can’t refuse it or spurn it or you’ll never get out or be free of it, which is all you want. And however it all comes out, it isn’t what you thought, or what you asked for.

He had thought the story was theirs, People’s, that he was in it by chance, somehow impelled into it by reasons not his, that it was a thing torn out of Ymr that shouldn’t be in Ka at all. But Kits was right, it was he who’d been in it, not People, however much they’d wanted to be and he had not. It was his story, and the stories about the story were his too. He was girdled in story, trapped in story, and the only way out was to go through. Perhaps if he did so, if he went on through to the other side, she would be healed and he done with Ymr and death for good. And he could simply be alive for some number of seasons with her in the plain world.

He lifted his eyes. A great Snowy Owl far off cruised the air, white against the white sky. The plain dangers, they stayed the same and could be learned; any smart Crow could make his way through them. Take care of a mate, raise young, live long. Pretty long. It would have been enough. It would be enough.

“All right. I’ll go,” he said.

“You will?”

“For life, Kits,” he said. “You and me. Life, long or short.”

The first thing he’d have to do, he thought, was to learn their language, so he could begin to bargain somehow with them. Before that first thing, though, he’d have to come close enough to hear them speak, without being driven off or killed. And before that he’d have to find them.

Kits believed that the Small People had pursued her in hatred wherever she went, she and whatever group of People nomads she and her flock followed. But Dar Oakley was pretty sure her thievery had drawn her into a demesne or neighborhood of Ymr, where Small People had always been, and—hardheaded Crow that she was—she’d wandered there not knowing what or where it was: Ymr, which wasn’t far from anywhere in Ka, as near to her as she was to herself. Now she was always partly in Ymr, as People were: as he was too.

When he did reach their land (and for all the things he can remember, in greater detail than it seems possible so small a head could hold, he can’t remember how he did), it seemed not different from the country round about it. The sun came up when and where it should, and went down again the same; beings that don’t speak in Ka—Snails and Moles and Snakes—were speechless there, too. But as he caught and lost sight of Small People on the mountain paths and along rushing streams, hairy-faced males and unsmiling females, he was less certain that he knew where he was.

They wore clothes: that was one thing. They wore broad-brimmed hats on their heads and coats on their backs. Dar Oakley knew what clothes were; he recalled them from his times among People who wore such items, unlike the People hereabouts, who didn’t.

And he could understand—almost—their speech. They’d stay far from him without seeming to flee or hide, catch him looking and turn their faces away to mutter with others, or make themselves scarce somehow, like a spotted Toad vanishing on a pile of dead leaves. But soon he could hear them as clearly as though he were near them, and in the language they spoke to one another he felt the language of People he’d first known returning to his throat from far away.

Mostly they talked about the weather.

Winter had come now, and as far as Dar Oakley could perceive—staying at a careful distance—they had no fire, and unlike Crows, People can’t live through winter without it. What he’d later learn would make him doubt that the Small Ugly People were People at all: when the cold deepened, they went down under the ground into caves and holes, and there, in piles and heaps, covered in the mats and rugs they wove, they slept.

Dar Oakley spent that first winter alone, for whether this was Ka or Ymr or someplace neither of these, there were no Crows here that he ever heard. He heard Ravens, and Wolves, but saw none. Just the white mountains black with great firs, the waterfalls frozen in mid-fall. He feared starving; he thought often of quitting. He’d just found his first good meal in days when he saw that the Small People were coming forth, like Bears or Woodchucks, slow and weak and blinking in the sun, their hair and beards grown long enough almost to clothe them.

So there they were, and here he was, and now he must ask them to give him a thing for which they’d ceaselessly pursued the Crow who’d stolen it. It was impossible—he’d told her so.

It turned out to be simple. The Small People offered to give it to him. Actually, they offered to give it to her, because that’s who they thought Dar Oakley was: Kits. No more than any People could they tell one Crow from another.

What did they want in return?

In the summer forest Dar Oakley on a low limb above a brook discoursed with an old, old, bearded being, his face shaded by his ragged hat, white beard spreading over his breast and shoulders like a Snowy Owl’s neck plumage. Of all the Small People, he was one who didn’t vanish when Dar Oakley came close and called, and Dar Oakley somehow knew his speech. It was like the soft gurgle and clatter of the brook he paddled his big pale feet in, but it was speech, and clear to Dar Oakley.

We hate it here, he said.

Dar Oakley becked; the Small One understood little or nothing of the Crow’s speech, and supplied Dar Oakley’s replies himself.

We’re sorry we came here, he went on. Three things we lack: Barley, to make beer. Bees, who make honey. And gold in the earth and the streams.

Dar Oakley becked again. He now remembered or believed that the Small One had said this many times in his hearing. If he said it when other Small People were near, they shook their heads sadly, or wept a little. It had taken a great work of memory for Dar Oakley to be sure that yes, nowhere he had traveled this side of the sea, in any of its reaches, was there the grass they called Barley, which People he’d once known had grown and tended. Nowhere were there Bees: never in this country had he seen a hive in a hollow tree full of wax and grubs. And since everywhere he’d been the People loved gold, Dar Oakley could be sure there was none here, or People would wear it and display it. He’d known that but hadn’t known he knew it.

Bring us those things, the bearded being said, and we will give you what you want. Barley. Bees. Gold.

I will, Dar Oakley said, not knowing what else he could say.

Also, the being said, we will give you what you want even if you fail to bring us those things.

Oh, Dar Oakley said. Well. All right.

That thing you want will take one year to grow. When that year is gone, bring us the three things we lack. The Barley for beer. The honey of Bees. The gold. If you do, we’ll rejoice. And you will have the thing.

Dar Oakley becked with all the certainty he could, lifted his wings, and called a call of fierce resolve. The Small One slid beneath the waters of the brook like an Otter and was gone.

Oh stories! Oh People! In all his centuries, how many stories had People told Dar Oakley, and how many about a poor fool charged with getting some ungettable thing—no, three ungettable things—who does get them, or seems to, or doesn’t? Very well: he’d think. He told himself to think, think, for stories always contain the answers to the puzzles they set. Barley for beer. Honey. Gold. How could he get them, or seem to get them, or get them by not getting them? For a year he studied the Small People as they came and went, though it was clear they didn’t want him looking at them, and now and then one would shake a fist at him, or—he guessed—at Kits. He thought and thought, tried to think even when high winter made his brain so cold no thought would come except about hunger. And when summer came again he had no more idea of how to get the Barley, the honey, the gold than he had before.

He came upon the white-bearded one sitting on the same rock by the brook and paddling his feet in the water, and told him this. The old one fetched a sigh, though he seemed neither surprised nor very saddened. Never mind, he said. In a month, when the moon is again full and sets at dawn, come to the mountain cave and the thing will be yours.

He came. In the dim light between night and dawn he couldn’t see well, but it seemed that the Small People were bringing out from the fissure in the rock one of their number who was hurt, or ill, and in great pain. He was supported by a male and a female on either side, who helped him stand, which he seemed hardly able to do. As the mist lifted Dar Oakley could see his gritted teeth. Water trickled, nearly squirted, from his tight-shut eyes. The People saw Dar Oakley there, but none of them paid him more than a glance. They brought the suffering one to a stone seat and let him down—sitting caused him to fling up his head in agony. Then one brought a pot that she placed between his big feet and spread knees, while others pulled away the trousers he wore.

The day brightened. Dar Oakley saw the old one who had made the bargain with him come forward and squat before the sufferer. Dar Oakley could see the slug-like organ that depended from his cleft, through which male People passed water; it was what everyone was looking at. For a long time—till the sun was high—they watched and waited, the one on the stone seat also looking down anxiously at his own part as though it might rise up or turn on him. Finally a small amount of dark water came out of it; the old one made a groan Dar Oakley couldn’t interpret; more water, mixed with blood, as the seated one’s thighs shook and he gripped his friends’ hands and cried aloud in pain.

Then—Dar Oakley could hear it—something solid came from him, and struck the pot with a tiny clink.

That was the stone.

The old one picked up the pot, swirled the contents, and reached in to pull out the stone; shook the blood and fluid from it, and brought it to hold up to Dar Oakley on his branch. All those not attending to the sufferer watched.

No, Dar Oakley said. I won’t touch it.

No, said the old one. He put a hand in his clothes and brought out a little sac, a skin thing that looked like a scrotum, empty and limp. He put the stone (plain and yellowish) in it, and drew the strings tight. Then he held it up again.

Go, he said. Take it. Have it. Never come back.

So it was that Dar Oakley went and returned, though not by the same way, and bearing the thing in its pouch, to the Beech now in blue-green leaf by the darkwise shore of the blue Beautiful Lake. It was good to see Crows again. The Servitors seemed to know he’d been successful and escorted him in, calling out announcements of his coming.

On a depression in a broad limb of the Beech he placed what he had brought before her, Kits. She sidled along the limb, eye cocked at the little skin bag, silent: as though (only later did he think it) wondering if she was glad, after all, to have it. Dar Oakley told his tale: the Barley for beer, the golden honey, the gold.

“They always stole the Barley for their beer from People,” Kits said, her eye not leaving the bag. “Not the gold. The People stole that from them.”

“The honey?”

“Yes, I’ve missed that, too,” she said. “I’ll miss that.” She nudged the bag with her bill and then gestured toward Dar Oakley to say You open it, and after a moment’s hesitation he did, holding down the bag with a foot and tugging at the string till it fell open and disclosed the thing inside: not aglow, not fearsome, as close to nothing at all as anything at all could be.

“This,” she said. Her head bent to it, close and closer. Her bill opened, her cheeks drew back: the face of any Crow, any Raven, approaching a cadaver in caution and desire. Dar Oakley’s head was near hers, looking in too.

Don’t, said a voice. A tiny, an infinitesimal voice.

They knew that voice, both of them, and backed away.

You’re making a big mistake, said the Stone.

“Oh, no mistake,” said Kits. “Not this time.”

I’m not what you think I am, the Stone said. Tell her, you!

“You are just what I think you are,” Kits said, bending nearer.

Don’t let her! the Stone said. She’ll be sorry. You’ll be sorry.

The Stone had begun to roll side to side within the bag, as though to get away or hide. There’s a rule, it said. Trust me on this. The rule applies.

“What rule?” Dar Oakley said. “What is the rule?”

Oh, she knows! said the Stone in a little whine of despair. She knows. Touch me once, live forever . . .

“Touch me twice, die forever,” Kits said. With a Crow’s quick stab she had the thing, and with a little lift of her head she’d shaken it into her throat. A tiny screech as it went down.

“Kits,” Dar Oakley said.

For a time nothing happened. The two Crows regarded one another.

“Dar Oakley,” she said. “I want to tell you. I’m sorry I went away that time you were gone into Ymr, looking to find a thing good for Crows.”

“No,” he said. She had begun to alter; her primaries loosened as if in molt. The edges of her bill cracked. “Kits!”

“I’ll tell you the reason,” she said. “I was afraid that you’d come back changed; that you’d be like me, and learn to hate your condition. I didn’t want to see it.”

“Hate my condition?”

“There is such a thing as too much life,” she said. Her legs sank; her eyes were becoming dull and glaucous. “Thank you, Dar Oakley.”

“No!” Dar Oakley cried. “Kits, you lied!”

“I never did,” she said. “I said I wanted help. That I needed this thing; that the first hadn’t been enough. I have it now. It’s enough.” She altered further, more terribly; he could hardly hear her. “I hope you have all the life you want or need, Dar Oakley. And when you want no more—when at last you don’t want anything more at all—I hope there’s one nearby who loves you enough to bring this for you, as you brought it for me.”

She lost her hold on the branch; Dar Oakley put out a foot to catch her, but she fell away—all but the foot that his foot held—and in a disordered mass fell to the base of the Beech. She was no longer she. She was a skull and a gray mass of under-plumage and a breast fallen in. She might have been lying there for years.

He couldn’t bring himself to fly down to it. Around him as he stood he heard cries and wings—the Servitors, shocked, crowding the branch he sat on, keening loudly. Dar Oakley couldn’t keep his voice from joining with theirs. The louder the clamor grew, the more Crows of the flock were drawn in.

Only when the ululation began to die away—and it went on long—did the Servitors fall silent and turn to Dar Oakley. He let out the last, smallest of grieving cries, one eye on them. That was their Queen down there, and he was the last to have been near her. They began to call a different call to one another—Who is this among us? What has he done, what should be done to him? This has been seen among Crows, a kind of drumhead court-martial with much yelling and dispute and then suddenly a sentence passed, and carried out: a dead Crow on the ground.

Dar Oakley let himself tumble from the branch as though shot and fall limply toward the ground. At the last moment he unfolded, landed feetfirst, and leapt aloft. He was gone amid the dense firs before the puzzled Servitors caught on; but through that day till the sun went down they sought him, calling from tree to tree, trying to catch him in a net of sightings.

He thought they had good reason to hate him. He hated himself. He thought, even as he evaded them every which way, that he should dive into the dreadful Beautiful Lake and drown if he could. Or he’d starve: just never eat again, until he lay desiccated and bony like her.

But he couldn’t. He was already hungry! So hungry. And that was the Thing inside him too, wanting and wanting forever and ever.

He flew. He could see in his mind’s eye—for though he couldn’t dream, he could foresee—the Small Ugly People, trooping all together, coming to the place where the remnants of Kits lay. Enjoying their revenge; picking through her bones and feathers to find the new Precious Thing and the old Precious Thing within her, and carrying them both away for good.

Rivers and streams run down from the lands of the Crow and Turtle and Wolf and Bear clans of the Longhouse People, rising in the great lakes and going down to the Dawn Land. It was the Good Son who made the rivers run so conveniently for traveling, and in the beginning they used to run both ways, toward home as well as away; the Bad Son changed that, and now canoes must toil upstream against the current to reach home. But at least the downstream journey was when the canoes were heaviest with furs and other things to trade for the pierced shells of the Dawn Land, beautiful and rare and valuable but above all sacred, the currency of peace.

The Dawn Land was so called because from there the great salt sea extended to where the sun rose every morning. The People couldn’t conceive of a big land beyond the sea, and more land beyond that, and then another sea and more land, until it all came back to this shore where they sat. Dar Oakley could: though even then, when years had passed since Kits had explained it, he still didn’t know if he believed it.

“So the Crow had failed in all his attempts to get nothing,” One Ear told the others, “and at last he gave up and turned alone for home.”

Killed, burned, fooled, robbing, robbed, humiliated—by then Dar Oakley’d heard the story many times in all the ways One Ear told it, and always complained that it hadn’t happened that way at all; but One Ear always said he liked it better so. It’s funnier my way, he said.

In this telling of One Ear’s, the Crow was sitting by the riverside and feeling sorry for himself for his bad luck when he heard a voice coming from beneath a pile of rocks beneath a pile of yellow Beech leaves—a voice of distress, or anyway an unhappy voice. He went to see what it was, and when he had scattered the leaves and pulled away the stones he found a skeleton there, all jumbled up, his chest and skull filled with bugs and mice nibbling away. The Skeleton rattled pitifully until the Crow saw that he must put the jaw back with the skull bone, and when that was done, the Skeleton could talk more easily, and asked the Crow if he had any tobacco.

Well, I do, said the Crow.

I’d be grateful if you’d fill a pipe of it for me, the Skeleton said. So the Crow took his pipe and his pouch and his flint, and filled the pipe and lit it. He stuck it in the Skeleton’s jaw, and the Skeleton gripped it tight with his remaining teeth and took a long draw. The Crow was amazed to see the smoke fill up the Skeleton’s empty chest and float out between his ribs, while the Skeleton grinned with pleasure. Meanwhile all the annoying bugs and vermin fled away from the smoke, and the Skeleton pulled himself together and sat up.

That’s better, he said. Thank you. It can get pretty uncomfortable lying here, year after year.

Hm, said the Crow. I’d have thought you’d have long since gone over to the Other Lands, where everything’s fine, and left all this behind.

Well, perhaps I have, said the Skeleton, but I don’t know anything of it. As far as I know, these bones are all of me there is.

The Crow said that indeed it was all he could see; and the Skeleton replied that, really, bones ought to be treated better than his had been, and put properly under the earth in a pot or a wrapping, and wept over. They’re all that the living possess and can honor when the spirit’s gone.

The Crow had never thought of it that way, but he saw that it was surely true. The Skeleton finished his tobacco and returned the pipe to the Crow, and said that if there was anything an old pile of bones like himself could do for the Crow in return, he should ask for it. Where had he been wandering?

The Crow told him how he had had a dream of a thing, a sort of thing that if he possessed it would keep him from death forever. And if you dream of a thing you want, you are meant to have it, and so he had gone in search of it, with no luck.

Well, the Skeleton said, I’m not the one to ask for help with that.

It’s all right, the Crow said. I don’t think it can be found.

Maybe not, said the Skeleton. But look at it this way. When you return home, you’ll tell the story of how you sought it and failed, and that story will be told and told again. And when you’re dead yourself, the story will go on being told, and in that telling you’ll speak and act and be alive again.

And so will you, the Crow replied.

I guess, the Skeleton said. And—well, here it is, being told, and we’re here to speak in it. And not for the last time, I don’t suppose!

It’ll have to do, the Crow said.

The Skeleton turned back to his hole, lay down, and drew up his leg bones. Just push those stones back over me, please, he said, and scatter those leaves over them. Gently now.

The Crow did so, and then flew out over the river to his home. He was pretty sure now that no matter how long he lived, he was certain to die; but, you know, he’ll be back. Crows die, but Old Crow never dies. Not until stories aren’t told anymore, and Death itself is dead.

“And that,” One Ear said finally, “is all of that story there is.”

The People had made their Dawn Land camp well above the high-tide line, and lain down there to sleep. When they woke in the morning they saw, standing out on the bay and coming clear as the morning fog lifted from the water, a thing that had not been there when they arrived. It was as though a tall rock or a little island had crept in while they slept. All the People went down to the water to look at it. Rising above its dark bulk were great poles like bare trees, whose branches were hung with ropes and white cloths.

People stood on it.

The Crow clan warriors armed themselves, not knowing what this might mean or who this was, but One Ear said there was no reason to fear. With Dar Oakley on his shoulder he waded into the sea, as though he might see the thing better if he went a few steps closer. And now as they looked other beings appeared, seeming to come up from within: four-legged, brown and black and gray. One of these was prodded and pushed and whipped by the People until it leapt off and into the water. More beings were pushed off, forced to jump; they went down flailing and under the water, raising white foam; then they surfaced, snorting, and soon were swimming toward shore.

The People ran back as the first one of these beasts to reach shallow water found footing and came up onto the beach. They had never seen such ones before.

But Dar Oakley had. One of these had walked beside the first two People he had ever seen, in a land beyond that sea, two thousand years before. It was a Horse.