Ka

CHAPTER TWO

Debra couldn’t have known, when we parted, how difficult it would soon become for me to do even the simplest things, keep her grave from being overgrown with invasive vegetation or her stone from being thrown down or stolen. I’ve visited, when my aide Barbara can drive me there; I bring wildflowers and look down at the earth that lies atop her, and caught in that human paradox of death that she never acknowledged, I speak to her and listen for her voice. I don’t hear it. It’s Barbara, who knew her only at the end, who weeps.

Barbara’s been with me now for two years, perhaps three—my sense of time’s passing grows uncertain the more time that passes. It was Debra who first hired her, when we still lived in the other place down in town, when Debra was getting worse quickly. Barbara was amazingly strong then; she could carry Debra up and down the stairs in her long arms, out to the porch in good weather. Twice a week now she cleans and prepares meals that I can warm up, does things around the house that probably I could do myself well enough but likely would not do if left alone. Strong still, even with the diabetes. I order firewood from locals; she chops it into stove lengths. She’s ashamed to go to doctors for herself, but she takes me, in her practically imaginary pickup, driver’s door tied closed with a belt, the road visible through the rotting floorboards. I can remember when cars and trucks had to be inspected by the state and proved to be roadworthy before they could be driven.

Today she’s brought her baby. She used to be able to find someone to care for him while she works. More and more often now the child comes with her.

I had hardly known Barbara was pregnant. I saw her twice a week, but she’d taken to dressing in wide flowered dresses without belts over her jeans, what my mother used to call muumuus, and Barbara was always fat. She was over forty when this child was conceived (where the others are that she says she’s had, what they do, I don’t know). I wondered if that was part of the reason for the child’s problems. But she said no, it was drink: drink before and drink during, almost up to the day he was born. And yes, I can see the thin lips, the lack of a philtrum between mouth and nose that makes him look like a brownie or pixie in an old picture: the dark skin and almond-black eyes, too: and so weirdly small and weak. The father of the child is white, and gone.

It was her fault, she says, that he is what he is, will never grow right or learn to think or speak like other people. Worst is, she knew when she was drinking what the effect could be; there are other children like hers among the Native American population still living hereabouts. Barbara was mostly raised in the lands around the lake, in one house or another, but hasn’t had much to do with the tribe, and doesn’t know who among them she belongs with. What little she has told me of the stories and beliefs that they retain seems to me rather haphazard, half pretend. I don’t know where she goes to when she leaves my place.

There’s one thing that might link her to the long past of her people, or maybe it’s just the way her soul is made. She is very tender toward the dead: solicitous, even. It’s not something she talks about; it took me a long time to even take notice of it. When she recalls the things they said alive, it’s as though she is spoken to now. She knows she’ll be among them, and she doesn’t see it as a long or dreadful passage—it may not seem a passage at all to her but a simple turnabout, like changing places in a round dance.

Since her pregnancy her diabetes has worsened, and her feet are twisted and lack feeling. We are now about equally fit, which doesn’t add up even to one fit person. More often than not now, when it’s time for her to go, I tell her she should sleep over in the spare room or on the screened porch, save tires, they won’t last even as long as I will. For a time then I lie in bed and listen to the child’s eerie, inconsolable wails. I get up and make my way with care (a fall would be the end of me) down to the shed, light the lamp, pick up my pen.

The pale-white People who came ashore from the ships anchored off the Dawn Land wore coats and hats and boots; from their faces hair sprouted sparsely or thickly. Most were smaller than the Crow clan traders watching them from the beach, and several were fatter; Dar Oakley couldn’t say if they were uglier, but certainly they resembled the Small Ugly People. He wondered if the Small Ugly People, who had come daywise over broad lands chasing Kits and the Most Precious Thing, had begun in the same country as these: were their relatives, maybe, who had come by the other way and traveled darkwise over the sea as Dar Oakley had done. The Crow clan watched as they tied the hind legs of their beasts together with straps so short that they kept them from running away—how simple and clever that was.

Somehow these People had known that this was the season for trading, and they brought things that most of the Crow clan had never seen, though other clans who lived along the Dawn Land shore were already using them: iron knives and hatchets of great power, fabrics lighter and warmer than Deer’s skins, and—most wonderful of all—beads of green and blue, transparent as sky, obviously imbued with spirit life: the newcomers gave them freely, laughing as though they were nothing. In exchange they took all the Beaver pelts, and by signs made it clear they wanted more.

When business was done—it took a few days—the traders invited anyone who wanted to come onto the ship that had brought them (see? That, yes, that), and One Ear was among the four or five who accepted. Dar Oakley watched him wade out into the surf and clamber aboard the ship’s boat, and the oars drop, and he remembered the boat of the Saints going into the unknown.

In time it would become clear that these People, though they came and went on their ships, meant to stay. They brought with them not only iron and glass and nails and swords but also Barley to grow, and in time beer made from that Barley. They brought no gold, or very little—gold was what they expected to find everywhere here, but there was none, as the Small Ugly People knew.

And they brought Hogs, and Cows, and the Honeybee.

Clover came along too, seeds on the feet or in the baggage of the newcomers, and it spread and grew; the Honeybees took pollen from it, as they had from the same plant in the lands from which the new People had brought them, and from Clover they made honey. The Clover spread fast, great fields of it, faster than the new People themselves spread, and the Honeybee traveled with it. The old clans, who were soon in flight from the newcomers or afraid of their arrival, would call the sudden patches of pink and white blossoms the white People’s footprint; the bad news of Bee sightings moved from clan to clan, People to People. Because Death—the other great gift the newcomers brought—was sure to follow after.

One Ear didn’t return to that shore for many seasons, and when he did come back, in a coat like the coats worn by the new People, there was no one living there but the white settlers, squatting in thrown-up log shelters or in the empty dwellings of the seacoast clans. No People, none: the squatters told him that the People of the coastal villages were all dead; nine of every ten. The few left alive with strength to bury the dead had instead fled the newcomers’ awful power, only to be caught later as sickness spread.

What had happened? The new People seemed to think—One Ear had got a bit of their mouth-twisting language by then—that the realm of spirits had decreed the sickness and death, so that they, the newcomers, could have the land without a fight. One Ear thought it more likely that the beautiful beads they had dispensed so generously had in fact been a kind of weapon, one as unlikely as their swords and the guns that blazed and banged rather harmlessly, only far more powerful; a poison, a curse.

One Ear—immune, or lucky—tried to find and bury as many dead as he could, until he realized that he would be dead himself of old age if not something worse before he could even find them all. His tall frame was still erect; his hair now was streaked with gray. He turned West and North, toward the lands of the Longhouse People and the demesnes of the Crow clan. By the time he got there, the killing things, whatever they were, had already come; there, too, the dead lay unburied, and the villages were empty.

There were many Crows, though.

Nothing like it had ever befallen in the history of these Crows. Wolves and Ravens and Vultures too had never encountered such riches before. In the face of it, territories collapsed, feuds dissolved, the number and size of young increased. You could follow a faint scent and come upon a whole village of dead People, children dead in their dead mothers’ arms, healers dead with their drums and their herbs in their hands. There was no one who’d bother to drive a Crow off, and no need to defend a rich find until the corpse-openers, the Bears and Wolves, found it; if these dead ones were too whole to enjoy, nearby there were plenty of others farther gone.

Dar Oakley explained to me how he convinced the Crows of his demesne—which over time came to include lands and families that reached nearly to the Beautiful Lake where Kits had reigned—that he himself was responsible for this bounty. I didn’t understand how he did this; his reasons, and their gullibility, lay too deep within Crow nature for me to guess at. But as territories went unpatrolled and Crows grew so numerous that calls and messages could be passed quickly and far, Ka became different from the old mobile association of families and smallholdings and momentary alliances disputing resources. Crow destinies had converged in the place where Death had for a moment conquered, and there became a nation, great, mighty, and numerous. In that nation Dar Oakley was honored, heard out, followed.

One Ear was old when once again Dar Oakley came upon him, far from the place where they had come to know each other.

“You aren’t dead, then,” One Ear said, looking up into the Pine where Dar Oakley and some close associates were gathered.

“No,” Dar Oakley said. “Nor are you.”

“Do you know what became of my wife and daughters?” One Ear asked.

Dar Oakley had no answer he could give to that. He might have been in on the eating of them, or he might not. Many People hadn’t resembled themselves when dead, and Dar Oakley had little memory of most when they were alive; out of so many, there were plenty who got no attention from Crows, and were the spoils of others, almost unrecognizable by the time the Crows at length took possession. It had become a practice of some People clans to dress the dead in their best robes with their weapons or ornaments and bring them to the high rocks, or (if the mourners had the strength, and the dead one was small, or a child) lift them on pallets into the forest canopy. From there the spirits could be released—Dar Oakley explained this to the Crows, and what it meant for Crow-kind—thence to go West to the Sky Gate and the other world, where there was no sickness evermore.

“That’s where I go,” One Ear said. “To follow Death, as far as my legs will carry me.”

“We’ll go too,” Dar Oakley said, not knowing why he said it, or why he would want to go darkwise. But in fact the riches of this land were growing thinner now; the last People remains had mostly gone to dry bone and tendon, or been buried by winter heaves and melts. The incoming People arriving to take the emptied lands had come from places over the sea where Crows were feared and despised, companions of evildoers, blamed for the sudden deaths of children. They liked to kill a Crow when they could, nail it to a slab-wood door for a warning.

So the Crows went west, darkwise, toward the night sky. Kits had said that there was no end to darkwise, that it only turned again to daywise if you went far enough, and Dar Oakley believed that now; but it was hard to explain to others.

Years passed. A nation of Crows doesn’t travel fast, and One Ear was slow; he stopped for lengths of time in places where the dead could be examined, and those not dead could tell him their tales; for a time he settled with a female and gave her help and was himself cared for. Then he went on.

“I’m the last of the Crow clan,” he told Dar Oakley. “Though I never was one of them at all.”

The new settlers, moving faster, catching them up and passing them by in the rush to take land (land that they supposed, wrongly, had always been as empty of People as it was when they found it), would now and then see a tall, solitary Indian, unarmed, who seemed to have some power to draw Crows after him: when he appeared, so did they, numbers of them, taking what they could of eggs and chicks and sprouting corn, shrieking horridly in the trees, and then over a few weeks or months mostly gone again. Following, the settlers supposed, the Indian sorcerer.

All around the flock as they went, before, behind, beside, walked the dead: One Ear’s adopted kin, his birth People, many more never known to him alive. Faces always to the West, silent, not strong, but never resting. The new People settlers couldn’t see them, though they would somehow remember them anyway long afterward, when the world had changed and even the forests had changed.

Dar Oakley could see them. Perhaps because his old friend could, and told him of them; but when One Ear at last stopped walking and lay down for good beside his cold fire, Dar Oakley continued seeing them. Were they following the Crows? Sometimes he’d see some of them standing still, making no progress; or, confused maybe, turned around toward the places they’d come from, where they could no longer go.

He saw the dead alive. Not in another land where People guess or dream they are, but all around, in the ordinary daylight lands poisoned by the living. So many of them, in their Deer-skins and shell beads, so many. He got used to it. He went on seeing them now and then, one or two or more, for long seasons afterward, though never again One Ear, the teller of stories. Perhaps he was one of those who reached the Sky Gate at last.

This was the first of the great dyings that Dar Oakley witnessed.

After many seasons passed, winter, summer, the Crows of Dar Oakley’s grand flock decided, Crow by Crow, that they had no interest in moving any farther, or in listening to Dar Oakley’s ideas and plans. They were satisfied with where they were. Successive generations spread daywise, billwise, and otherwise into flocks and demesnes, and claimed freeholds in the ancient way. That took I’d guess a century or two, and by the end of it they lived as Crows have always lived, and no trace and few memories of their long migration remained.

In those demesnes were People, People in clothes, with Oxen and wagons, who at winter’s end turned the soil in long brown rows where Crows could hunt for grubs. The Pigs and Sheep that the People kept for food and wool sometimes fed Crows, too. Crows ceased to be feared, mostly; on the lanes and byways that the People made from house to village the children walking together counted the Crows that they saw:

One for sorrow

Two for mirth

Three for a wedding

Four for a birth

Beyond the planted lands were still forests choked in underbrush, as they had been in the high lands and glens where the Wolves gang terrorized travelers; what Crows didn’t know was that these impassable forests weren’t ancient but new, the result of the settlers not understanding how the former People had burned the undergrowth yearly to keep it down. Untamed, the settlers called the forests, wild, primeval, not knowing they had themselves made them. And they set about cutting them, for lumber and potash and the land that they stood on. Dar Oakley watched trees being girdled, not one or two here and there as One Ear’s people had done it but in great numbers, and when they fell and the stumps rotted, they were burned where they sat or were pulled away by groaning Oxen. Farms were begun. They separated the land with long fences of stone or sticks, they gathered honey from skeps, they ground apples for drink. (It’s a strange thing, Dar Oakley says: though he’s sure he remembers raiding Beehives in his first land, eating sweet woolly Honeybees and getting stung, tasting honey on his tongue so sweet it burned, Crows in this land never did and never have.)

Content to be retired from his long generalship, Dar Oakley fell back, along with the descendants of his former followers, into immemorial Crow life: feuding, poking around, stealing, taunting Owls. Lolling in the hot sun. Gossip. Food. Nests.

Love.

Kits (Dar Oakley told me) thought this was the hardest thing about too much life: that you lose mates. Outlive them, one after another. If your mate’s not killed, he dies old, but you still remain to mourn, mourn for this lost one more than you ever did for any lost one before—or anyway, each time it seems so. You know it will happen so again, a grief piled upon you over and over, and you decide to have no more, just live single among Crow friends as the Saints did, and for seasons at a stretch that was what Dar Oakley did. But you can’t just stop. You can’t, not forever. Kits could only stop by deciding to cease living altogether.

“Those yours?” he asked a Crow who’d been watching the games of young Crows, this year’s and last.

“Some, I think,” said the other. “That one with the spriggy head feathers. I think one of mine just had that one, but maybe that was a different one a time ago.”

“Well, seasons pass, you forget,” Dar Oakley said.

“They’ll be mated soon,” the other Crow said. “Young of their own.”

How beautiful they were, the older ones teaching the younger, the younger cautious or bold, showing already the sort of Crows they would grow up to be. They played at dropping a stick from a height so that another could catch it, fly up, and drop it in turn, to be caught again: but they’d invented playing the game in a group, where players circled around the stick as it fell, competing to be the catcher—was it better to be above the stick and dive down, or below and shoot up? Graceful, quick, never touching. The game had been invented a thousand times over, generation after generation: Dar Oakley knew.

“Getting colder,” the Crow said. “You notice that?”

“Old Crows feel it,” Dar Oakley said.

“I smell snow in this air,” the other said. “Maybe good to move.” He pointed his bill in the direction without a name, opposite to billwise.

Perhaps because of their history of always moving on, the Crows of Dar Oakley’s nation—what remained of it now—had adopted a practice rare though not unknown among Crows: they migrated in winter. They didn’t go far—they weren’t Terns or Hummingbirds driven to cross oceans and hemispheres; they went south by degrees as the cold grew deep in their lands (and this was a time of deep winters) until they reached places they found sufficiently warmer than home, and there they stopped. They filled the Oaks and Elms for a time, and when they felt the first intimations of mating time, they wandered back.

Dar Oakley liked the idea, which he told younger Crows had been his own. He liked new scenes, new sorts of spaces with occupants strange to him. He’d leave whatever winter quarters the flock established and fly in a wide circle through the lands around, no reason, just pulled by that old un-Crowlike impulse toward solitude, the tug to go where no Crows are: to feel briefly that faint shiver of dissolution.

There were Crows native to those parts, of course, and Dar Oakley watched them. Even from a distance they knew him for a stranger, and he took care not to arouse hostility. He listened to the talk he could get close enough to hear—he understood most of it, despite the odd soft accents it was cast in. The season was a little advanced here from what it was at home, the cues of day-length and warmth coming sooner; pairing and nest-building had already begun. It was odd to watch it begin while not feeling it in his own body. One among the ones he watched was a female, unmated, just in her first season of maturity, he thought (he was wrong about that). A little small, perhaps—smaller than he was—but brightly black, with an air of self-possession, a cunning eye that reminded him of more than one Crow he’d known, and yet she seemed like no one he’d ever seen before. She was courted by many, the males dashing at one another where she could observe, dancing before her, and she seemed likely to choose one of them, maybe this gallant glossy one or that fat cunning one, but no, none of them pleased her enough. Dar Oakley wondered why. There are Crow confirmed bachelors and Crow spinsters—his Other Older Sister of long ago had been one. He didn’t think this Crow was among them.

When his flock turned for home that spring in ones and twos and then in crowds, Dar Oakley stayed behind.

He knew it would be little hard for her, a singleton surrounded by mated pairs. Those who were mated kept her away—a lone Crow isn’t something you want near a nest of just-hatched young—but she didn’t respond to challenges, didn’t seem to notice them, and walked anybody’s freehold as though she were welcome there.

Which made Dar Oakley pretty sure he could let himself down where she foraged among the dandelions, and not spook her. Still, he kept a certain distance. He knew she knew he was there, though she took no notice of him. Whenever he took a few steps closer to her, she went farther off, as though she’d maybe seen something good that way. When they’d played that game enough, he called sharply to her, Hey! Hey you! She didn’t fly; she lifted her head and made a civil response, as he’d known she would. In her own good time she lifted off, and so did he, and when they both touched ground they were side by side.

“Good day,” he said, and she becked in acknowledgment, unalarmed. “You’re looking black today, I must say.”

“Thank you,” she said in the soft voice of her flock. “I’ve seen you. You’re one of them, aren’t you, the ones who come in winter?”

“Yes.”

“They’re all gone,” she said. “You’re late. Your mate will miss you.”

“Haven’t one,” Dar Oakley said. “No more than you.” This embarrassed her not at all, and her eye held his, waiting. “All those suitors,” he said. “I saw. None of them pleased you?”

“Oh, they were fine,” she said. “Most. Not all.”

“No, I’d guess not. But you never made a choice.”

“The choice wasn’t mine to make,” she said, and when he took a stance of puzzlement, she laughed. “Well, I don’t know how you all make matches where you live. We here have a way.”

“A way, what way?”

“A way of being sure.” She lifted her head, looked this way and that, as though afraid to be caught telling secrets—but no, maybe just shy to say. “It’s fine to seem strong and healthy and all that. Most all are. But you want to be sure. Will they always do what you need done, no matter what it is? Can they? You don’t know. So you ask them—or tell them, really.”

Dar Oakley was visited with a memory, sharp as a thorn, of Kits demanding that he do impossible things to win her favor. “What things do you ask?”

She told him. If she’d had fingers, she would have counted the tasks out on them. She’d set them for all her suitors, she said, in this spring and the last, and not one had done them; most had refused outright, for all their becking and strutting.

“Well, they’re very hard, those things,” Dar Oakley said. “Maybe impossible. It makes me think that if you set such hard tasks, maybe you don’t want a mate at all.”

She took a stance of her own, and let him interpret it: that yes, he was right or was all wrong; that she didn’t know if what he’d said was so, or did know and wasn’t telling.

Then she turned her attention billwise. “You hear those Crows?” she said. “Let’s go see what they found.”

But he knew he’d better not. He was still a foreigner here, a Vagrant. He’d keep his distance. He watched her lift off and away.

It’s possible to think of Crows, or any being with an estrus, as neither male nor female for most of the year. As summer comes and young Crows fledge, that part of Crow life subsides and shrinks—literally for males, whose testes have grown to many times their normal size in mating time—and Crows can become pals with old rivals again, or at least indifferent to them, and new friends can be made.

It was more often she who sought Dar Oakley out that summer. They walked and ate together. (That sounds like they met for lunch, but what it means is that they spent the daylight hours foraging, since what birds mostly do all day is look for food and eat it. Flight costs a lot.) If others kin to her joined in on a good find, he’d retreat.

When it grew too hot in the long afternoons of that land of hers to hunt, they’d sit in silence in the deep foliage of a tree he had no name for, and watch the world; or, because she asked, he’d relate the story of his life to her. She didn’t believe the tales, really, and forgot them almost as soon as they were told, but it was a relief to him to tell them at last; she marveled at his journeys and murmured softly for his deaths. Like Desdemona she loved him for the dangers he had passed, and he loved her because she pitied them.

He told her how, long ago, he had invented names: how names made stories possible, and memories of who did what in times past. She listened with care, though she seemed to think that names were really a game that friends could play just for their own amusement.

“I’d like a name,” she said. “How is a name got?”

“You choose it,” Dar Oakley, “or better, it’s chosen for you. You’re named for something you did, or something special about you.”

“Special?”

“Something that makes you different from others.”

She pondered that, but seemed in no hurry to make a choice, or think up names to choose from. Dar Oakley thought, though, and waited for the right one to appear; there could be only one.

“Well,” she said, “there is one thing. One story of a thing that happened to me.”

“Yes?”

“When I was young,” she said, looking not at Dar Oakley but at the world around, “I got the idea that I wanted to go away to a place where no Crows were. A place where no Crows had ever gone.”

Dar Oakley wondered if he’d heard this aright: words crossing from his own life over into her mouth. “A Crow alone is no Crow at all,” he said.

“Well, so,” she said, as though she hadn’t heard him pass the old saw, “one day I did set out. I thought I might just go about and study other creatures, and find out how they lived, you see? And one day learn to be no Crow at all.” Now she turned a black eye on him, maybe to see if he listened. “And after I’d gone far enough, so far as to leave all the Crows in the world behind—as I thought—I came to a deep, black, still lake, where I saw a Kingfisher a-sitting on a branch above the water.”

“A Kingfisher?”

“Mm-hmm,” she said. “Bright blue, the way they are? With an orange breast? And she was fishing. I watched her fly out over the water, hover, point her big long bill down, and then drop into the water. Gone! Then, quick, she burst up out of the water, and in her bill was a little white fish. She settled back on that branch, and swallowed it.

“Well, I’d never seen a diving bird before—I said I was young—and I wanted to know just how it was she got that fish. So when she did it again, I watched real close, and what I saw was this: as she dropped to the water, another Kingfisher just like her came up from below the surface, and just when the falling Kingfisher reached the water, her bill touched the bill of the Kingfisher coming up. Right then there was a thrashing and a roiling of the water and the Kingfisher rose up just like before with a fish.”

“No,” Dar Oakley said.

“She’d taken it right from the other after a bit of a struggle.”

“No, no.”

“So that looked like an easy way to get a meal. I thought I’d try it. It took some courage to just fling myself into the water bill-first. But sure enough, I could see as I came close to the water that a bird was flying up to meet me—only it wasn’t a Kingfisher. . . .”

“It was a Crow.”

“It was a Crow like me, bill open like mine, with no fish in it for me.”

“Oh no.”

“Well, I couldn’t help it, I went down under the water’s surface, and kept going down and down underneath. It was all dim and sparkly there, like a day when raindrops fall on your eye-haws. I couldn’t see the Crow who lived down there. . . .”

“The Crow was you.”

“But the other Kingfisher—the one who brought up the fishes for the one who dove—she was there, and she was angry with me. I knew even though I couldn’t understand her words. I’d no business in her realm, she said; my plumage was the wrong kind, I was a stupid bird who didn’t understand a thing.”

Dar Oakley thought: Is a story a lie? As hers went on he’d begun to think of One Ear, and the adventures he’d say he had under the earth or in the sky or riding on an arrow: he wasn’t lying, but he wasn’t telling the truth. He’d never known a Crow who’d talk so. Except one. Likely she was paying him back for his own impossibilities.

“Why,” he asked her, “are you telling me this?”

“I was just coming to that,” she said, and her stance was teasing and shy at once. “The Kingfisher said that because I was ignorant, because I was young and foolish, she would help me to get out of the water if I promised never to come back again. I didn’t know what to say. I think the cold of the water was stopping my heart, or my breath. But the Kingfisher took ahold of me—don’t ask me how—and bore me up through the lake and out into the air and even as far as the shore, where I somehow scrabbled or scrambled up and out. And I sat in the sun and tried to get dry all that day long.

“But you see, what I’ve always been so sorry for—I never thanked that Kingfisher for taking me out of the water. And now I can’t go back, because I promised I never would.”

“Ah,” Dar Oakley said.

“I can’t go back,” she said, and turned an eye on him. “Back under the water of that lake. Not I.”

Dar Oakley considered the sleek black bird, who seemed not in the least distressed by her difficulty. He had no intention of asking her another thing about it, since her reply would be obvious. “Getting cooler,” he said instead. “Let’s you and me go find something good to eat.”

Soon enough summer had passed, and the rain and the gray clouds came over the southern lands, reminding him of his first home beyond the daywise sea. When Dar Oakley’s relatives, migrating from the snowy north, began to appear, they were surprised to discover him there—they thought for sure he’d been caught and eaten. Now it was her turn to stay away, the strangers having a bad reputation among her flock, such as gypsies anywhere can have: as though thievery and a black eye on the main chance were qualities only of others from elsewhere.

“So you’ve been here all along?” one of his kin asked Dar Oakley.

“Yes.”

“Good living here?”

“Oh, pretty good.”

“These Crows hereabouts are tough, aren’t they?”

“Like a lot of Crows back home,” Dar Oakley said, which got a laugh.

“Well,” said the other, whose name Dar Oakley can’t recall. “I won’t be having much to do with them anyway.”

“Nor they with you.”

“But you got on well, it seems,” said the other, in something like suspicion. And Dar Oakley took a stance—I’ve seen him do it—a stance that has the same uses, I think, as a shrug.

She didn’t see him much in that season, but sought him out in late winter when her time had begun; he made himself easy to find, in a place away from others. Because he’d spent a year in this place, because of her nearness, he was in the same state this spring as she. They faced each other as new persons, though not as strangers. I wonder if it’s like turning back into a teenager, once in every year.

He groomed her, and she allowed him to.

“So these tasks,” he said.

“These tasks,” she said. “You know about them.”

“The Kingfisher,” he said.

Her eyes closed, in thought or pleasure or both. She named the other tasks, and the list seemed to differ from the one she’d given him before.

“Well, I think I could do these things,” he said. “I know I could, though I’ve never tried any of them. I’ve never met a Kingfisher.”

“No,” she said.

“But you know,” he said. “I’m very old.”

“Old,” she said.

“I don’t suppose,” he said, “that you’d want to change them a little because of that, or remove one or two?”

“No,” she said.

He bent his head before her; she took the feathers of his head in her bill one at a time, and cleaned each one. “Well, anyway,” he said, “you might think about how long they’re going to take me. If I’m ever able to do them all. Which here I swear I will try to do.”

She withdrew from him, turned away, and back again: that dance.

“It might take me so long, though,” he said, “that you’d give up on me. Forget that somewhere I’m still at it.”

“I won’t,” she said.

They were quite close. He turned with her, becking up and down.

“I just want you to know,” he said, his head now alongside hers, eye to her eye, “that if some quick-wing youngster should set forth and do all you ask in a single season, I’d understand—I mean I would if I ever learned of it—that you’d have to choose him. That you should.”

“All right,” she said. She had bent low, wings outstretched, almost sweeping the earth.

“But still I will do those things.”

“Kingfisher,” she said. Her tail rose, spread.

“Every one. I’ve sworn.”

Then there was no more need for tasks, as Dar Oakley knew: poor dead Kits had taught him in the long-before, when she’d chosen him though he’d done none of the tasks she set for him. They were never meant to be done, only accepted, but accepted for real, with all your heart as Dar Oakley would learn to say. That was what no suitor of this youngling had guessed; and Dar Oakley couldn’t know if it was so for every courted female, or if it was only so for some—those like her, black her; didn’t know if she knew that the things she asked for had no value, not for her or him, they were nothing, had anyway been done already in the very naming of them, her to him, him to her: Kingfisher, moonlight flight, People’s oxcart, Fisher cat, mountain quartz. Because now they were aloft together, a blur of wings and tails, and then aground again, all accomplished.

One thing more.

“They’ll hate you,” she said. “My kin. They hate all of you.”

“Fly away with me,” he said. “Billwise to my demesne.”

“They’ll hate me there. They will.”

“No,” Dar Oakley said. “I’m Old Crow in that land, the biggest of Biggers. No one would dare.”

She moved beside him. “Dai,” he whispered to her, “ndai, daya, na.”

“What’s it like there?” she asked.

“It’s good. The best land.”

“Are there cherries there?”

“Cherries?”

“I love cherries,” she said.

“Na Cherry,” he said.

“What?”

“Na Cherry,” he said, and now he was close as close to her again. “Your name.”

“We don’t like her,” a big female said. “Your mate. She’s not one of us. We hate her.”

In the greening trees of his demesne, Dar Oakley could perceive Crows he hadn’t particularly taken notice of before, mostly males—the females were already sitting eggs. They regarded him. More were coming in.

“She’s fine,” he said, and stepped closer to Na Cherry. “Don’t worry about her.”

“We’re not worried,” said the female, who as far as Dar Oakley knew had not chosen or inherited a name. “We don’t like her.”

“It’s all right,” Na Cherry said. “I’m all right.” Crows of this place had dismantled the first nest she’d begun, and the next as well. Dar Oakley’d driven them off, told her they were jokers, harmless.

“It’s not all right,” the big female said. “She has to go. We don’t want it.”

“You can stay,” a Bigger whom Dar Oakley knew called out. “She has to go.”

“It’s our country,” called a voice from the trees. “It’s for us and ours.”

Dar Oakley roused, his plumage rose, he grew in size; the Crows in the trees did the same. Several dropped to branches closer to him and to Na Cherry. Defiance, he perceived, might not be the right choice. He’d known times and places where such things as seemed about to occur here and now really had occurred: he knew what a mob of Crows could do, would do if so moved. He and she could turn and fly, but that has a certain effect on a mob—as not only Crows know.

“Your country?” he said, not loud but definite. “I led you to this country, long ago. I was first among us then, before any of you were born. We met Crows here and made nests among them. Mated with them, male and female.” He thought that none of them remembered this, that few enough even remembered being told the tale. They wouldn’t have dared censure him this way back then. Had his kind grown more contentious, intolerant, and he’d not noticed it?

“Tell me this,” Dar Oakley called to them all. “Tell me that you, any of you, would give up a mate.” There were calls and noise all around, objections made. “No, no,” Dar Oakley said. “Just tell me. Or what if it was you ordered to go, leave your mate and your freehold. Tell me you’d do it.”

For a moment that seemed to still them, but Crows won’t ponder hypotheticals for long, and clamor returned. Dar Oakley could feel Na Cherry tremble beside him, her wings taut. “Wait, wait,” he said. “Stop.” He put all his old authority into the word. “Stop now. Listen.”

One by one they shut up.

“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “We’ll go on. We’ll go to a place I know of, far from here. A place not in Ka at all.”

Not in Ka? Mocking laughter, cries of Go, go! and some aggressive shifting of places, putting the big Crows closer to Dar Oakley and his mate. Not in Ka? Wherever we are is in Ka!

“Oh yes,” Dar Oakley said. “I know a place.”

What place, what place? He told them: a place where food is endless, always more coming to be, where Crow young keep coming forth, where there is more life-sustaining death than all of us, no, many more than all of us again and again can ever use—but only coming into being as we need it.

Much hilarity and denouncing for this, but some old Crows, alpha females, heads of families, stayed quiet. “Where is it, this place?” said one, and some others took up that call.

“Think I’d tell you?” Dar Oakley said. “Go find it for yourselves. If you’re lucky, we’ll see you there.”

This was too much. Cries and demands, Tell! Tell! but Dar Oakley stayed quiet. He could feel Na Cherry shrink against him. All she had for assurance was stories, stories he’d told of tight spots he’d got out of, lands he’d seen.

“All right, all right!” he called as loudly as he could. “I’ll tell you what. We’ll stay here and you go.”

He waited for this to shut them up. It didn’t quite. “Yes!” he said. “Let us two take a small freehold hereabouts, say over daywise, beyond those hills, where once we all flocked. Small, a small freehold there, out of the way. And I’ll tell you everything I know of this land I’ve found.”

They were all listening now. They might still feel murderous, but he thought they wouldn’t do murder now. “All right,” he said. “This land. It’s easy to get there. Nearer than you can know. So close you can reach it by not going there at all. In fact, that’s the only way to reach it.”

“What?” shrieked a big female, the same one who’d first sentenced Na Cherry to death or exile.

“This land,” Dar Oakley said, “is not like other lands. It’s like no other land. Other lands you go to; this land comes to you. You get there by staying where you are.” The tension in the trees was supplanted by head-twitching waves of curiosity and doubt. “You don’t believe me? Haven’t I been the traveler? Didn’t I carry your fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers to lands of wealth? I can’t lie; you know I can’t.”

Dar Oakley took a brief flight to a farther branch, and no one challenged him. Na Cherry hurried to stand beside him. “This land’s for you alone,” he said. “It’s coming. Watch for signs of it. We won’t be there.”

They weren’t satisfied. If this land comes to us, why hasn’t it come before? Because you never wanted to go there, and didn’t know you could. If we don’t like this land, how can we return from it? You wouldn’t want to, ever.

Finally, silence.

“Well,” Dar Oakley said. “Good-bye, then.”

He dropped from the branch, and he and Na Cherry were flying. Not fleeing, flying. They heard calls and queries and disputing behind them, but they sailed on as though everything was settled. They went and took that little freehold over the eastern hills, and built a new nest there just in time, and Na Cherry laid her first three green-and-black eggs. The freehold was at the edge of the flock’s demesne but definitely within it, within the greater company of Crows and their patrolling. It reminded Dar Oakley of that newcomer’s freehold on the marches of the demesne where he’d been born; of his sisters, of his mother and her Servitor, of the Vagrant. The memories gathered within him without his choosing; it was like being lifted effortlessly on a thermal. Watching over Na Cherry in their nest in a great resinous Pine, he wasn’t made to think of Kits or any other mate of the many he had had, but of his mother sitting her eggs and talking to him of his own days in the nest.

In summer he watched Na Cherry with their gawky young, their breasts still barred in gray, as she took them out in the world. See there, children, what is it? It is a dead calf of the People’s over the hill. No one’s discovered it! We call, Ka! Ka! to see if others will come to the find. Call, children! Now we may wait and see, or shall we go down alone? Yes, let’s. Your father will keep watch, and wait. Now do as I do. We’ll begin, children, with the eyes.

Na Cherry never lost the soft articulation that had made her a shunned alien once, but the others ceased to be offended and in time hardly noticed it. Some of the younger males even took a mating-time interest in her, and one or two applied to serve her—but Dar Oakley, tolerant old Crow though he’d become, would have none of that. She lived long, in Crow years; her and Dar Oakley’s children eventually numbered in the dozens, and many lived. Of all the mates that Dar Oakley’s had, Na Cherry was his the longest; when she died, he’d lived beside her for so many seasons that he had almost forgotten that it was possible for her to die—and impossible for him to die and not to live on without her.

He doesn’t know where or how—that’s common enough. Her eyes had dimmed—she could have mistaken a thorn hedge for a sheltering brake when pursued. Or struck a tree with a wing and hidden herself to heal, and was found by a Fox, a Marten. (He looked in all the hiding places they both had committed to memory, and found neither her nor Crow feathers in any.) Taken by a Hawk, a Redtail or a Falcon; by an Owl when he and she were apart at night. Shot or snared for sport by a People child, the remains of her claimed by scavengers. All these things he pondered. The light bodies of birds are quickly consumed by death and bugs. Everyone knows.

It was a long year. Dar Oakley remained on his and Na Cherry’s freehold till autumn days grew short; sometimes his sons and daughters came to see him, asked him for stories and wisdom, but he didn’t have much to offer them beyond gratitude for being there. He flocked as usual with the others in the great roost when the cold grew deeper; it didn’t matter if he wanted company or not, there was safety in numbers when predators grew bold.

But he didn’t travel south with them that winter.

He ceased eating, or almost ceased; he’d made no vow, just didn’t feel compelled to. It seemed that in Na Cherry’s death, the deaths of all those he loved were contained: the nestlings washed out of nests in rainstorms, old friends who took fool chances, mates leaving at morning and not returning at night. They seemed, dreadfully, dead but not gone at all, not one of them; not vanished, not from him even if from Ka.

He huddled skinny and cold on a high rock, looking out over snow and white sky.

Was it really true that after death there was nothing left of a Crow, nothing but bones and feathers? Would that be worse than to know that somewhere, somehow, Na Cherry was still alive, still herself, that all those he’d loved over long years were too, in a place to which he could never go, and out of which they could never come?

It could be, couldn’t it, that there was such a realm as that within Ka—the Ymr of Ka, in a way—even if it was closed to Crows until death. Of course there was! Where else had he been, in all those summers and winters when he wasn’t among the living? He couldn’t remember anything of it, and for all he knew had just slept there, as oblivious of himself as any Crow with his head on his breast and his eyes closed and his feet locked in sleep around a branch. For all he knew. But what if it wasn’t that way? If he could go there dead and return, why couldn’t he go there alive and return? They were there, Na Cherry and all of them, or they would be if he could believe they were.

He squeezed his eyes tight shut, as People did when they wanted to see what wasn’t there. How did they do it, make a country out of their desire for one? He knew he would never see Kits again in any realm. But he wanted to see those he’d lost, he wanted to see his mate again, he wanted it with all his heart. If he couldn’t have this wish, he wished himself to be dead, dead as dead, if that alone would take him to where Na Cherry was.

In the darkness of his closed eyes he felt a presence, soft yet large, come behind him. His eyes opened and he saw the snow and the hills and the far houses from which smoke came. All unchanged. Only this presence.

In a sudden fear he changed his stance on the rock and looked behind him. A great Snowy Owl stood near enough to smell. There was no way to escape it, and Dar Oakley couldn’t fly anyway, paralyzed. The huge yellow eyes. The white ears, big as a Sparrow’s wings. Motionless. Dar Oakley supposed the Owl was about to kill and eat him, and in that way he certainly would be borne to that land, wish answered. He lowered his head. He hoped it wouldn’t hurt.

You, said the Owl. You have summoned me. Why?

I summoned you?

With all your heart.

Dar Oakley looked up. It was hard to believe the great bird had spoken. Hard to believe, also, that he himself knew what to answer to the Owl’s question.

My mate, he said (tilting his head up to meet its gaze), is dead. I want to go to the land where she is and see her once more.

Yes, said the Owl. I will take you if you want to go.

You will?

It is my realm, the Owl said, and I know it.

Dar Oakley had seen Snowy Owls rarely. On the bare island of the Terns. In the land of the Small Ugly People in winter, big enough to carry one of them off. The only Owl that hunts by day: a night bird in the day.

Listen to me now, the Owl said. If I am to take you, you must do everything exactly as I say and do just as I do, or the ways to that land will vanish forever for you.

Why? Dar Oakley asked. Why will you do this for me?

He looked into the Owl’s eyes, so large he could see plainly the pupils dilate and contract, and he saw his answer; or rather he saw that the Owl was his answer, and he’d get no other.

Remember, it said (though the narrow black beak, seeming too small for the huge head, never opened). Exactly as I say, all that I do.

Yes, said Dar Oakley, who knew that he himself had not spoken words aloud either. Yes, I will do all that you do and all that you say to do.

We’ll fly, said the Owl, and opened its white wings, so broad that Dar Oakley for an instant could see nothing else; then it was in flight, and Dar Oakley followed.

Had she sent this Owl to him? he wondered; had she heard his call and dispatched it? He had opened an Ymr in Ka; anything was possible.

This is fine country, he heard the Owl say in its strangely thin small voice.

In fact, the country they flew over, the country Dar Oakley had been looking out on when he made his wish, seemed to be losing qualities. The dark clumps of forest, the streak of pink cloud, the far-off People village and its smoking chimneys, were gone.

Yes, indeed it is, he said. Fine country.

We’ll fly over the river, the Owl said, and rest in that grove of trees.

There was nothing beneath them but snow.

Yes, we will, Dar Oakley said. Good.

After a time the Owl pulled up, spread and beat its wings as though to take a perch, and settled on the ground. Dar Oakley did the same, flying down and then stalling, to settle as on a branch beside the Owl.

See down there? the Owl said. A Mouse.

Dar Oakley studied the surrounding empty waste. Yes, he said. A Mouse.

The Owl lifted its wings slightly—and then closed them, strode across the snow a few steps, and leapt on something that wasn’t there. Lifted a huge foot to its mouth and ate nothing. It turned its head far to one side and then far around to the other side—that motion of Owls that makes some Crows believe that they can turn their heads all the way around. Then it took another brief run and leapt on prey again, lifted an invisible something to its mouth, and returned to Dar Oakley. With one foot it took nothing from its mouth and held it out to him. Eat, it said.

But, Dar Oakley said.

Eat, the Owl said.

Dar Oakley cautiously plucked the invisible Mouse from the fearsome talons and smacked his bill, clack clack. Good, he said. Nice and fat.

Refreshing, said the Owl.

Oh yes, Dar Oakley said. Hits the spot.

We’ll go on, said the Owl. Through that broad pass and into that valley.

They flew over a bare white world under a white sky. After an unknowable time (flying where nothing changes above or below can’t be measured), the Owl fell back beside Dar Oakley.

That big Hemlock grove ahead, it said. There we will find her, among the others.

Yes.

We’ll stop at this Oak, and prepare.

Prepare, yes. We will.

No grove, no Oak, but once again they settled on the ground, Dar Oakley doing his mediocre imitation of stalling to take a perch on a branch. The ground now seemed made of nothing at all.

I will go see if your mate flocks with the others there, the Owl said. Tell me something of her that I can recognize her by.

Well, Dar Oakley said, she’s a Crow. She’s on the small side.

The Owl only blinked its great eyes. It could blink them one at a time: this one, then that one.

She’s had many young, Dar Oakley said. All mine. Well, except one brood. Or two.

The Owl waited.

She likes cherries, Dar Oakley said, feeling a hot constriction in his throat. Or she did.

Very well, the Owl said. I will go into that grove and seek for her. At night I’ll return, and you’ll go in.

At night?

Here night and day aren’t as they are where you come from. You’ll see. Now watch how I go.

It lifted away. Dar Oakley watched carefully as it flew a distance, then made a series of complex motions that suggested a big bird entering a tight space, like a Hemlock grove. Then it vanished.

All through the day Dar Oakley sat on the not-earth and waited. It’s difficult for any active being to sit and wait, but for a Crow to do so, on the ground, unmoving, with nothing to look at or listen for, was nearly unbearable. Dar Oakley felt his thoughts detach and fragment like cloud.

What was it that had happened? Perhaps the Owl hadn’t taken him anywhere at all. Perhaps he was indeed dead, killed and eaten by a Snowy Owl. If so, then it was Dar Oakley alone who had gone on, propelled by his last living thought or wish, guided by the image of an Owl who was actually back there right now tearing Dar Oakley’s plumage from his flesh. And now that image was gone, and here he was in the Crow land of death, which consisted of nothing at all; and here he must wait until by means he couldn’t conceive he would once again find himself a living Crow among living Crows. It made a horrid sense.

He turned in place, lifting his eyes. The Owl was proceeding toward him from out of the place or point into which it had vanished.

Very well, it said, when once again it sat beside Dar Oakley on his imaginary branch. She is indeed among them, and you will find her there. Now night has come. Go just the way I went and do the things I did.

All right, Dar Oakley said. There was nothing else he could conceive to do.

He lifted off from the ground, forgetting he was supposed to be dropping from a branch; he hoped that wouldn’t count against him. Now where was it exactly that the Owl had disappeared, before? There was no way to know. Dar Oakley picked a spot in the placeless air and tried to imitate how the Owl had angled itself with care into the Hemlock grove that wasn’t there. Bank this way, stall, fall that way.

The grove was there. He was in it, and it was filled with Crows.

Crows, gathered at a winter roost at twilight, yakking, calling to friends, leaping branch to branch, chatting and laughing. They seemed to go on forever, and the grove, too, forever. Late sunlight fell through the dark branches and dotted the Crows with glitter, so familiar. A great glee filled him: he was where he should be.

Well, well! he heard a Crow say. A voice he knew from somewhere, sometime; a harsh, rich voice, challenging and chummy.

Va Thornhill, he said, and turned to see that Crow. It’s you.

As ever, Va Thornhill said.

I’ve missed your black eye.

Can’t say the same, Va Thornhill said, and laughed. But what brings you here only now? What’s the story?

No story, Dar Oakley said, having no idea how he’d answer that question, from a Crow so long dead.

Oh, you always had a story, Va Thornhill said, and laughed again.

Dar Oakley laughed too. He becked as though in a hurry, and passed from branch to branch, seeing others he knew or thought he knew; some hailed him in welcome or amazement. Dar Oakley! Is that you? Was Death filled only with his friends and relations?

When outside he had felt night come on, but as the Owl had said, now in the grove it seemed to cease, and the happy hour of sociability at day’s end to go on and on. In Death there is no sleep.

She appeared then, not as though he spied her far off but as though a Crow in his view gradually became clearly her. She was amid others, some he knew, one he suspected of once fathering a brood of hers. She was regarding him without surprise, and the chatter of the others seemed to fall away.

It’s you? he called.

Dar Oakley! he heard her say. I’m sorry to see you.

Sorry?

If you’re here, she said, you must have died, there.

Well, he said. It seems pleasant enough here, where all of you are.

The tilt of her head said that he knew little about it, and the little he knew was wrong—which was surely true. But there was company, talk and jokes, as though this time came after a long day of good things to eat and fine flying weather, and it went on and on. He remembered Fox Cap in the Other Lands, when he’d said that People must find it better here, where everything they liked went on forever. It’s not better here, she’d said with cold certainty.

Then Dar Oakley and Na Cherry were side by side. The others had moved away without his seeing where. What was he now to say to her?

Na Cherry, he said, I’ve been granted a wish. At least I think I have.

Oh? she said. What’s a wish?

Well. It’s asking for something that you don’t have but want more than anything.

Oh, she said. And who do you ask? A friend, a child?

No, Dar Oakley said, but then couldn’t say more. Who had he asked? Death? Himself?

She waited.

I asked for this, Dar Oakley said. That I could come here, just as I went to those other places I told you of.

Oh yes, Na Cherry said, as though remembering for the first time something from long ago. And here you are, she said. Welcome, you. For good.

No, no, he said. Just for a time.

Even as he said it, he knew he couldn’t bear it to be so. He didn’t want to be dead to be here, and couldn’t stay anyway as long as he was alive; but he didn’t want to be out of her presence again, lose her again.

It seemed there were snares set within granted wishes: he hadn’t known.

Night’s passing, Na Cherry said. Soon it will be dark and still.

Tell me about this, Dar Oakley said. All this. Are there mates, are nests built, eggs laid?

Well, she said. There’s talk of all that. There are nests and young, and the young grow old, but then again not.

Memory, Dar Oakley said, and Na Cherry went on looking at him with the same placid interest. They talked long, not of death but life, of what she recalled from earth, though she seemed not to care to hear about her many young and how they’d fared. Meantime it had grown dark in the grove, though it wasn’t a nighttime sort of dark but a dull vanishing of things visible. He thought he saw Na Cherry speak, but heard nothing. The Crows were silent, then gone. He was on the bare white earth in a blank dawn.

The Owl on its great soundless wings came to alight beside him. I’ll guide you home, it said.

No, Dar Oakley said. No, not yet.

Did you see the mate you came to see?

Yes, but it wasn’t enough. There should be more. More time. More—he wanted to say more life, but that couldn’t be said. The Owl only closed and opened one eye.

I want, Dar Oakley said, to bring her back with me to the world. The whole world. If she’ll come.

You don’t, the Owl said. You don’t want that.

I do. I said that I want it and I do want it.

What was he doing? How could such a thing be demanded of Death? But he had demanded it, and would get it. He knew Death; he knew what it could take and give. His heart swelled.

The Owl looked around itself with its mobile head as though for a definite answer to give. Then it said, This is possible.

Yes, Dar Oakley cried. I knew it must be, and it is!

It is possible, the Owl went on. Because you have been a friend to Death, I will tell you how.

Yes, Dar Oakley said. (Had he been a friend to Death? Where, in what land, among whom?)

To do it, the Owl said, you must act exactly as I say.

I will.

No one ever does, the Owl said. Now listen. If she will come with you, you must return exactly the way I brought you. You must never look back toward this place, this grove where you found her, not once.

Yes.

She won’t speak, the Owl said. Stay close to her through all the journey.

Yes.

And, said the Owl. No mating. No matter what. You understand?

Well, Dar Oakley said. It’s winter.

I’ll say it once more, the Owl said. No mating, not till you reach the land where living things are, your own land from which you came. There she will become again what she once was. But if you do not do all this, she will return to where she came from, and you can never go that way again.

Dar Oakley said nothing.

Night’s coming, the Owl said. Be off.

Did she say yes when Dar Oakley asked her in the pale light of the following night, the night that was day? He says she did. What was it like, crossing back across that cold white waste as it turned back into snow? He talked, plied her with stories, and she seemed to listen, but she didn’t answer, not until the world began to become the world.

“Remember that old Pine?” he asked her. “The one with the Bee’s nest in its hollow?”

Yes, she seemed to say.

“It blew down,” Dar Oakley said. “Cracked right there at the hollow in a wind. Bon Hawthorn, you remember her?”

Yes, she said.

“She and her mate built a nest in that Pine that year. She said, ‘We’ll have Honeybee grubs to eat all the spring.’ Then comes the big wind. Ha-ha!”

Yes, she said.

The white land became a place, and she began to grow distinct, and warm. They slept in the real night—it seemed to Dar Oakley that it had been long since he’d done so. They foraged in the melting snow, and she ate what they found, shook her head and swallowed, and was the Crow he knew: but still she wouldn’t or couldn’t speak to him in their common tongue.

Then spring began.

They weren’t yet home, certainly; but wasn’t this earth, old earth, not Death’s nowhere any longer? No, he mustn’t think that way. But it was quickly growing hard for him to think at all. In any spring it’s so, and in this spring more than in any other. What Crow had ever fought as hard for a mate as he had for Na Cherry? There were Crows who thought, Well, spring’s spring, a mate’s a mate: but Dar Oakley knew that some springs are more spring than others. Those when new mates are won. Those when lost mates are found.

Couldn’t she feel it?

She said yes. But he didn’t know.

“Let’s fly on,” he said.

He awoke next dawn feeling twice the size he’d been the night before, greedy, fierce, strong. Her sweet indifference only made him more so.

They went to forage, walking together.

“Na Cherry,” he said, coming close, head low.

Yes, she said.

There are long dances on spring mornings and short ones, every Crow knows, but once started they won’t stop. Dar Oakley could think, No, no, but it was as though he heard some other Crow say it, far away.

Did she accede, join in? Lower herself to the ground and lift her tail feathers because she must, or because he covered her? He doesn’t know; he doesn’t know, now, if she was ever really there at all.

Dai, he whispered, and from behind her he lifted her spread tail. Ndai, daya, na.

No, she said.

A black shadow flitted or fled at his darkwise eye, a soft sound of lifting wings—nothing he really saw or heard. Nothing: he was grappling with nothing. He cried out, staggered forward into nothing open-beaked as though he’d dropped something heavy. He was looking billwise down the far long way they’d come to reach this place. Something flitted or fled that way, and then didn’t.

A small, thin voice spoke: Crow.

He jumped forward, turned. The Owl settled soundlessly before him.

I didn’t do it, Dar Oakley said. I didn’t, really. Just almost.

Crow, the Owl said, you are just one day’s flight from home.

No, Dar Oakley cried. No, no. I didn’t do it. I mean, I’m sorry! I didn’t do it and I’m sorry.

I knew it would be this way, the Owl said.

No! Let me go after her, bring her back. I know the way there.

There is no there, Crow. You are a fool. I’ve given help to you for nothing.

It rose up with an awful beating of wings, lifting its huge armed feet to strike. Fool Crow! it cried. Dar Oakley dodged away, but a long curved talon caught his cheek before he could turn. He fell to earth and lay still. He felt the wind of the Owl’s passing.

Remember, he heard the Owl say, already gone.

He lay motionless for a long time, eyes closed. Pretty soon, he knew, beings would come to eat him: it was what he’d do himself, seeing a thing like him lying as he lay.

He wondered if the Owl knew that this was what had to happen. He still wonders about that. He thinks about stories, how if they begin at all, then their ends are set, they can only happen one way; or is that so only with the stories Death tells in Ymr, about the beings there? Maybe such stories are told so that the living will learn, and learn again and again, that they’ll never win anything from that realm.

Well, he could tell it to himself now. The luckiest Crow who ever lived, and he had never won anything from life or death that he could keep.

The grass crackled, daywise, and something snuffled. Dar Oakley kept his eyes tight shut. Fool. Better off dead. Maybe dead he’d find himself again with her, even if he’d never know of it.

He sensed a fur-bearer. Instinct was stronger than resolve. He leapt up with a cry and a thudding of wings, and the being was gone so fast Dar Oakley couldn’t name it.

The hurt that Death had given to Dar Oakley’s cheek healed, but the plumage in that patch grew in white. It’s still white today, and I suppose ever after will be. Over time the journey to the Ymr of Ka grew dim and unreal to him—what he tells me now of it is all that he retains, and even that little he’s unsure of. He thinks there must be more; for one thing, there is no color in any memory he has of it.

He remembers Na Cherry, though. Whether or not Death tricked him into that journey just to teach him a lesson (him and all Crows, though what other Crow ever needed to know it?), he often puzzles over whether it’s worse to know that Na Cherry is somewhere, in a grove at evening, laughing and talking and remembering—or gone altogether, as though she hadn’t been. It’s a People problem that’s now his. And in summer, when the cherries ripen on the trees, he’ll say her name, thinking somehow that she might return with them, if he watches and waits: that he’ll find her eating her fill amid the laden branches.

Meanwhile, of course, the new country that Dar Oakley had promised to the flock kept on coming, even as the Crows stayed where they were. Now and then one or another Crow would stop him to ask about it, that land, When’s it coming, if it is? and he’d just nod wisely and say, Keep your eyes open. And it did come, season by season, closer and closer until they could see (those who still remembered the bargain the flock had made with Dar Oakley) that it was as he had described it, where Death provided, where young endlessly came to be, where things were on the whole good for Crows. They were surprised then to find Dar Oakley also there, him with the white patch on his cheek—unmistakable. And his and Na Cherry’s children, too, and then their children’s children. When they’d question him, he’d take the stance that’s a shrug: Don’t know, it’s just the way things are in that country. To which Dar Oakley now gave a name for them to have, a name that had never existed before in Ka because it was for something that had never before needed a name. I can’t reproduce on the page the sound of it, but if it has an exact translation into our speech, it would be the Future.

That new country would in time also take in the region not-billwise to which in the depths of winter these Crows migrated. They went down there each year by the old ways, which they found were still the same there in the Future, the landmarks the same. But those misty rolling hills of Na Cherry’s old demesne really were different, and for a few winters brought forth wealth never known before to Crows who hadn’t been with Dar Oakley in the Great Dying so many years before. When that land had given way to even more or farther Future, and the sudden riches they’d found there were gone, long-lived Crows would remember it as the Land of Dead Horses.