Ka

CHAPTER ONE

The years when Dar Oakley lived among the city Crows in ignorance of his own history were also the years when the great arrangements of time, space, thought, and activity that he calls Ymr (where what People believe to be so is so, where they live enclosed in their own inventions) began ever more rapidly to fall apart: as though thought alone had kept them in working order, and thought was failing. Over centuries People—some People—had become more and more sure they could do anything, make anything, change anything: and so they could. They had even—too late to stop—changed the earth and the seas and the seasons: changed Time. People knew it and knew that it was their fault, even if they were among the ones who could do nothing about it.

I wonder if Dar Oakley ever understood how a city works. If he was there when the high city center was still supported and fed by the periphery and the far lands beyond, whose products it bought and sold; the traffic on its broad brown river, the hundreds of train tracks that ran in and out, the factories that worked day and night and the People who went into and came out of them like tides. Even if he was there then—not long after he died, decades before I was born—I don’t know if his powers of perception could have grasped it all.

Certainly when he first found himself there, a city dweller, he had been there a long time. It took him a while to understand he hadn’t actually traveled far from where he’d last died, blown apart by Dr. Hergesheimer’s dynamite. Rather the city had moved toward him, or to that place he’d been living, taking over fields and farms and woods and towns all the way out to where Anna Kuhn had once lived: as though like the broad river that divided it, the city could flood at certain seasons, overtop its banks, and spread brick and steel over the land.

For an indeterminate time, then, he’d been traveling to the great trash mountain in the company of the Crows of the city’s river islands. He had no family hereabouts, as far as he knew, perhaps no family anywhere: a vagrant, as in many times past. Nobody disputed his taking a place in the river-island roosts at nightfall when he first found himself among them—that was winter courtesy of old, no Crow excluded so long as you mind your manners. He ate there in the mountain’s piles with the rest, now and then crying his delight as they did. He had a sense that he had not been doing this forever, for a lifetime, a Crow lifetime; but seasons came and passed and came again before he knew himself.

Oh, they were lords then as they hadn’t been in any place before, their grand knitted confederacy grown huge over time and strengthened with pacts and agreements (unspoken, of course, but firm nevertheless) in which Cooperation ruled. Maybe they were hated, but who cared? There was Plenty everywhere, a Land of Plenty such as he had once promised to Crows, and no need to fight, no need to have firm friends and relations who would fight beside you. Where there is Plenty, there is Peace. Crows flourished as never before. They yakked all day in triumph, they “darkened the sky” in their thousands, there was almost no one left in these environs but the People and they. There were Crows now who lived until they died simply from being very old. Dar Oakley the oldest of them all, of course, watching those around him age while he somehow did not. How was it that Kits had grown so old in her long time alive and he hadn’t? She never died until she died forever: were his deaths then for him a refreshment, a bath of water or smoke that kept him a Crow of middle age?

“Hungry?” cried one stout, bright-eyed female at him as he alighted on the mountain at morning. Crows these days grew big—the old folks marveled at their own offspring, giant louts, strapping fellows, fatsos.

“Never not,” Dar Oakley called back, and they both laughed at the old joke.

Big and well fed they were, but not all were well. Near where Dar Oakley sought breakfast, a Crow was messing with a broken box of some kind, plucking at its flaps and sides to get it open. Dar Oakley came closer in brief hops, making careful gestures of inquiry, but the fellow paid him no attention. Now Dar Oakley could see that his eyes were clouded, as though the inner haws were drawn across them, though they weren’t. A gum leaked from an eye-corner; his head seemed ashy, unclean, and his bill hung open to get breath.

Sick. Many now were sick, young and old, despite how the flocks were flourishing. Dar Oakley felt an impulse to shun this one, but the box he was messing with was intriguing. It’s hard for a Crow to resist a thing in hiding, and city Crows know that many bags and boxes have good things inside them. Dar Oakley took the box lid in his bill and tugged, rowing backward with his wings to get purchase, and so did the other. Whatever was in the box was heavy and smelled worth uncovering. Crows may have a limited sense of smell, but this odor they know.

“There,” said the sick Crow, though the lid hadn’t given way. He pecked at it but let Dar Oakley take over; every little while he looked upward for threats or interference, looked daywise, then darkwise—there was nothing to see, but Crows can’t help doing that. The box lid came away. Dar Oakley staggered a step or two with it, his bill impaled on it, trying to shake it off.

“Well, well,” said the sick Crow. “This is a nice find.” Other Crows were circling in, curious, alerted by his interest. None seemed to know any of the others—made no signs of it—but there was no contesting.

“Lucky,” one cried.

Dar Oakley stepped closer to the box. Crows were muscling in, heedless of precedence, delighted. In the box was a People’s infant, partly wrapped in a cloth. Dead.

“Pretty fresh, too,” said a Crow.

The skin of the thing was blue, its face seeming shrunken like a winter apple, eyes squeezed shut. How long was it since Dar Oakley had seen one, much less tasted one? The odor of it stronger too now that the box was opened, an odor so familiar to him yet so remote. Something stirred within him at the sight and smell of it: lengths of something unfurled within him that had taken a long time to furl. It was as though the dead child before him had startled awake others, others he had seen and known and eaten of, alongside other Crows, themselves all long dead, their faces forgotten. Who were they all? What had they been to him? For a moment the stained box was bottomless, and beneath this baby lay many more, back down to the beginning.

The nearby Crows warily eyed Dar Oakley’s stance of silent immobility, not knowing what it intimated, and Dar Oakley, seeing that, becked with sarcastic deference. The sick Crow—the others kept a distance from him, as Dar Oakley had done—lifted himself with effort to the box’s edge and settled on the infant body. His bill with a sharp thrust pierced through an eye, an easy morsel to get first. That female who’d joshed Dar Oakley alighted, nodded at the food, and at him. “Go ahead,” she said. “You’re welcome.”

“No,” Dar Oakley said. “No, none for me.”

“Not so hungry after all,” she said, and laughed. That sharp bright eye a little cruel. She knew him for an outsider. The sick one went to probing the eyehole for the brain behind.

Dar Oakley hopped back and rose away from them, turning as he rose to avoid hungry birds coming in to feed. Rose, above the mountain.

So long since he had seen one dead: and how long since one so young? The People, in the latter time of Dar Oakley’s knowing them, had come to hide their dead, keep them close, case them in strong cases and not so much as look at them when they carried them out and put them, case and all, into the earth. Not so, once: he could feel in memory the many that had been just abandoned on the earth all bare, dead infants left behind or left beside their unburied kin, their mothers. That was during the People’s great dying: they were the sick, the murdered. Before that was the time—the length of it opened within or beyond him—when the dead, laid with care on the ground, young or old, would be watched over through a number of days and nights before being put into the earth or the fire with songs and keening; or lifted up in their bright wrappings to woven beds in the trees or on the high ledges so the Crows and others could probe the flesh and let their spirits out. That had been good eating.

If in Ymr as it was now they had given up all that, forgotten it, no longer cared even to hide their dead away, then it almost seemed that Ymr might be ending, vast as it was. Ka, too, was vast, greater than ever; the demesnes of flocks and the old family freeholds of Dar Oakley’s long-ago youth melted now into one another and vanished, no borders, nowhere now without its complement of Crows.

Ymr was vast but thin. They threw away their young now. They had become the ghosts they used to fear.

Well, perhaps it wasn’t so. Dar Oakley went higher over the mountain; the People and the Crows, the scavengers and the feeders, the rising smoke and the machines, changed in his sight as the folds of the mountain closed below. Surely it wasn’t so—it was only that he had seen so much. His soul had darkened.

Whatever the case, he wanted no more of it. He was now as Kits was at the last: done with it, done with Ymr, with sickness and Plenty.

Below him as he passed were the long strings of People’s places, their roads and wire-strung poles, the stone fields where the cars were parked in flocks, buildings alight in the dawn where who was doing what. Not far off and rising up more sharply than any mountain stood the city center. Crows living large in its streets and trees, feasting on its wealth, side by side with People. Crows below him too, black against the morning, on wires, on rooftops, cruising the earth in numbers.

He turned billwise with steadying wing beats. He had an idea—an idea that he now seemed to have been nurturing for a long time—about a land he might go to, a land that lies far that way, or ought to; where winters are white and long, and Ravens are lords. Use his old skills again, in a place where such skills would still be useful. He didn’t know if such a land could be reached, or if it would lie within Ka—that is, if Crows could be found there.

A place where he too could learn at last to die forever. Or if not that, forget.

It would be a long way to go alone, certainly, with all the dangers and the long solitudes to endure. He had been often and long alone, here and there, in Ka and Ymr, but Crows may be many, Crows may be few, but one Crow alone is no Crows, that’s the truth. What succor would he find as he went?

Crows rarely fly far without stopping now and then to rest, but Dar Oakley quite soon felt strangely weak—he came down to sit on the long, bare branch of a dying Oak. Day was as full as day would become. He thought again of the dull-feathered Crow he had seen on the body of that People child: a sick Crow, probably dying. He settled his disordered plumage, once, twice, three times, blinked, and realized with a certain satisfaction that he wasn’t feeling so well himself.

I can compute at a guess how many miles it was Dar Oakley had to fly to reach my house and yard, but not how many days or weeks it took him. I don’t know if he flew straight (“as the Crow flies,” in the old phrase that’s no more true than a thousand others) or if he wandered daywise, then darkwise, looking for something he couldn’t name or picture, while the illness tried and failed to kill him. When he got here, he wasn’t the Crow he had been, but nor was he any other Crow. However he had gone, wherever he had thought to go, he had arrived at a place not far from the shores of the lake where Kits had found a death at last.

Whiskey in the morning today. Pain is worsening.

From the porch where I stood at dawn with my glass, I could see out on the lawn the spectral Deer, Whitetails, who looked up from their browsing to stand for a moment immobile, looking at me with their great brown doll’s eyes. Then—instead of dodging fastidiously away—they returned to their breakfast. I counted seven, young and mature. I say “lawn,” but it’s not my lawn, not kept by me; it’s their doing. They’ve eaten down everything that can grow, including the leaves of saplings, which then die away. Now it’s like a nobleman’s ride out there, large trees and cropped green grass in the checkered shade, and that’s all. No more than Crows in the city do they have predators to keep their numbers down—so long as they shun the trafficked roads around. They’ve made the woods their own, modified them to suit themselves, as once the Indian clans did, and the white People after them.

After a time my staring bothered them, and they bounded off, not very seriously, in that lovely slow-motion way of theirs. The birds were loud. Robins, which I used to see in ones and twos listening for worms, now seem to come in flocks.

Dar Oakley’s gone often in these spring days, I don’t know where; perhaps despite all his vows and forswearing he’s mated again, and feeding young. Or maybe he’s grown tired of our long colloquy—which won’t be much longer now. I look up now and then to see if he’s winging this way. Sometimes I wonder if he might have gone for good. I feel sure it’s not so, yet for a moment I can foresee an abandonment I think I could not survive.

“Survive” is a foolish word to use. Not the word I may use, no, not at all.

When I was a teenager, I announced to my mother that I no longer believed in the real existence of the spirits that she, like Anna Kuhn, claimed to listen to. Nor in the spirits those spirits spoke to, nor the world where they congregated. I had no good reason to give for why I didn’t believe; I just didn’t. When I tried to think about that placeless place, it seemed to be eternally dark, the ones there forever alone—as though I were trying to imagine nothing. And she said to me that it was commonly known (her spirit informants had spoken to her of it) that those who in physical life do not believe—or refuse to believe—in the realm of souls will find themselves after death in precisely the dark emptiness that was all they could conceive when alive. They’ll subsist there alone and unseeing amid the busy throngs of the dead in their bright habitations.

Son, my mother said, you refuse to believe because you’re afraid of the dark; but your refusal is itself the darkness you fear.

I am afraid: not afraid of death, but of darkness and solitude, and I always have been: as afraid as any Crow. It’s why I have asked Dar Oakley to guide me at the last to that place, for which I now have at least his tales for evidence. I don’t mind so much really if that realm is pleasant or unpleasant, but let it be not empty. Let it be where the sheaves are gathered in: Anna Kuhn said it was. I’m not such a great sinner that I need to fear it, and I don’t; I won’t. Just let it not be alone, in the dark.

Well, it will be what it is.

I wonder, though: will I see Debra on the other side, the place the dead are? Will she be embarrassed that I have found her there, will I say I told you so? How fatuous it seems. Forgive me, my love, if I resign before the work’s done that I promised to do for you; it would never have been done, no matter how long I kept at it.

I’m too old for scheming and concealment now, and rather than trying to keep it from her, last week I told Barbara straight out about my plan. She wasn’t shocked—I could tell she wasn’t, though she sat down heavily and stared at me for a long time without speaking. The next day she told me that she wanted to go with me. She wants to join me there, on that high place I mean to go to, take that step—and it will be a step, one step—with me. And she’ll bring the child as well, she says. The nameless child. She says it’s her duty to return the child to the ancestors (or, on some days, to God) who can remake him in a better form, and send him back to some mother better than herself.

I have no grounds on which to tell her otherwise. Should I have dissuaded her, argued for life, sent her away, found help for her somewhere? Convinced her to remain? I can’t even convince myself.

I wonder if Dar Oakley will recognize the spot I have selected. I may have misunderstood the geography of his travels in this land—he certainly ended up far darkwise from here in his latter lives—but long ago he was hereabouts, and knew the lake whose common name I’ve been told translates as “beautiful,” though when I asked Barbara if she knew this word in the language of her ancestors, she shook her head in sadness. Not sad because she didn’t know, I don’t think: all that Barbara says and does these days seems infused with sadness.

It’s not far from my house. There’s a state park entrance that leads to the standard facilities of such places, a parking lot, toilets, a booth where maps are posted—all of it now neglected, the parking lot broken and weedy, the plastic covers of the maps so yellowed and fogged the maps can’t be read. It doesn’t matter; I know where I am when I am there, and where the trails (still discernible) will take me. The steepest will wind up to the top of an ancient row of clay cliffs that stand above the margins of the lake. These are glacial drumlins, rock piles turned out by the moving ice mountain that made the lake bed. Millennia of windblown loess have built high cliffs over these, and the same wind has carved them into weird shapes, some like cathedral spires or ruined castles or stupas, hardened now into piles as unerodible as granite. On the sloping landward side they are forested, but on the lake or windward side they are as sheer as walls, and nearly bare. The trail I’ll take us on ends at that windward edge, quite high up. A fine view. There was once a guardrail or fence, but no more.

Not long ago—perhaps it was winter this year, or autumn last year—Dar Oakley tried to convince me that the expedition I’ve decided on is a bad idea. It’s hard to describe how this touched me, whatever his reasons might be. We were in the kitchen, sharing a lunch of boiled eggs and dog food (for him; Dar Oakley loves the hard pebbly kind, and it’s cheap).

“This place,” he said to me, “this place after death you think you’ll go to. Let me tell you. It doesn’t exist.”

“It does, though,” I answered him. “You of all persons know it.”

“I don’t know a thing,” he said.

“You carried them there,” I said. “So many of them. So you said.”

“So they said.”

“Just take us to the gate,” I said. “That’s all I ask. As you took the Singer.”

He tilted his head up, darkwise, downward, daywise—in difficulties, thinking what to say. “It’s very far away.”

“Well, yes, perhaps.”

“So far away it doesn’t matter how far. Too far to go. Especially for one who can’t fly.”

“It is very far away,” I said, “but it’s also easily reached. Isn’t it? They say not a day and a night passes between the moment I’m no longer here and the moment I’m there.”

“That’s a little hard to swallow,” he said. “Don’t you think?”

“It’ll be short enough if you’ll stay by me.”

He stood looking at me with first one eye and then the other, and it was easy to know what he thought: that he’d been there and I hadn’t. “All right,” he said, “I will go with you as far as I can. But then I’m for elsewhere.”

“It’s all I ask,” I said.

“It’s no place for Crows,” he said.

“No, you have your own place. You told me about reaching it, that it was hard but possible.”

He looked at me, one eye, the other eye.

“A story about cherries,” I said.

“Ah,” Dar Oakley said. “That story.”

It occurred to me at that moment for the first time that Dar Oakley may have lived lives he doesn’t now remember—lives that were too short, too dull, or simply lost in time and unavailable to him as story or as memory. I’ve been thinking about that. I wonder, too, if the stories he does tell me, of lives he remembers living and leaving, are actually chosen by him for me alone. The ones I need most to hear. To Crows he may tell others, full of interest to them. These are mine. And this one the last.