Ka

CHAPTER THREE

Barbara has come in the truck. She has put on various bracelets and necklaces of stones and leather that I’ve never seen her wear before. I won’t ask her about them; their use or meaning is perhaps evident. The child’s cheeks and forehead are painted in stripes of black and yellow. I wonder if these are her own invention, or really come from a tradition she still retains; she’s certainly never shown any such knowledge before. She’s hung a little crucifix around his neck as well.

This is the day: we’ve agreed. There’s no particular reason that it be this day, but this is the day.

She climbed down from the truck and stood resolute in the dirt of the drive, feet wide apart in new sneakers. “It’s a good day to die,” she said. A line from the movies, I suppose. Since then she’s been as still as a stone. The child is silent too, held within the frayed carrier that straps around Barbara’s middle, like a womb, as though he’s still waiting to be born. Maybe it’s Barbara’s activity at other times, banging around the kitchen and muttering, that makes him give those spectral wails.

I’m a little fearful, a little excited, like a boy off to his first day at a new school. Itur in antiquam silvam, stabula alta ferarum. The journey into the old woods, the deep dens of the beasts; the door into no-place. Where Æneas went following Odysseus, and Dante following Virgil. And now me following a Crow. They had no trouble finding the gate, and nor will I.

I’ve almost reached the end of this last pad of paper. Only a few leaves will be left unfilled. As the generation of leaves, so is that of men. I’ll now take a pill to keep my heart from racing distractingly, and another to keep my muscles working. It’s a fair climb up. This pad and the other filled-up ones I’ll leave here on the table, though I have no expectation that anyone will look at them, or take an interest in what they say. My continuation is elsewhere; and if it isn’t, I won’t care if anything of me persists here in this world, from which I’m already gone. I have sometimes thought of or felt the presence of a reader for what I’ve written: I suppose it’s impossible to write at length without feeling such a presence. When that reader momentarily has a face, the one I sense is Debra’s.

He’s here waiting, Dar Oakley: I saw the movement of a black branch of the flowering Cherry, and there he was, calling the call Ka. Death-bird. This pen is dry.

Well, Reader—you whose existence I only half believe in, and whom I mostly know to be me alone—I guess you’ll be able to tell by these further pages filled with writing that the journey must not have eventuated as envisioned. It didn’t. I’m uncertain, though, whether I can tell what things did happen—if any things at all happened. I may not be certain of anything ever again.

Certainly we set out in the truck, Barbara driving and me holding the child in the ragged denim straitjacket, not wrapped and belted around me but gathered in my arms. He seemed to weigh nothing at all, but he struggled to act, his head arching back and his tense hands grabbing air. Dar Oakley beat alongside, crossing over us now and then, skimming once so close to the open window that Barbara ducked instinctively; sometimes we lost sight of him and stopped, only to hear and see him on ahead. It seemed a long trip—longer than I remembered or imagined—and yet when the park entrance appeared it surprised me, and for a moment my heart rebelled.

“Here,” I said.

“Yeh,” Barbara said, and turned the wheel that way.

Pretty quickly it became apparent that the truck couldn’t get far past the entrance. It was hardly spring, but the heat had brought forth masses of creeper and kudzu-like green stuff I couldn’t name, each kind entangling with the others and trying to gain the high trees, like madmen trying to climb up each other to get out of a pit. The trees already bore thick cloaks of that vine I used to see only on the trees along highways, enriched with carbon dioxide from cars. Where these got their strength I didn’t know; it looked like another planet.

There aren’t many now who leave from the same world they were born into. Not here, not anywhere on earth as far as I can tell or know; the simplest and most unchanging of human societies have been so shattered in the last hundred years, people flung into centrifuges of change and loss, that there comes to be nothing at last to say good-bye to. I was leaving the world, but it was not my world I was leaving.

Barbara got out, carefully removing the truck keys and pocketing them. I held the child, clad in only a droopy diaper, while she tied on the carrier. She settled him in the pouch and nodded. It occurred to me I had never heard her speak a word to him. From farther on along what seemed the path I heard a Crow.

It was a longer climb than the last time I’d made it, with Debra. I thought Debra would be present to me as we went up, but she seemed to want no part of this expedition; she had a horror of suicide that I didn’t share but learned never to speak about. We stopped now and then to rest, and Dar Oakley would return to us and sit a branch and regard us. I’ve always been reluctant to speak to him in Barbara’s presence—I haven’t wanted her to think I’m nuts. It didn’t matter now.

“Do you know these ways?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “I know these birds calling. That’s all.”

“All right,” I said. And then: “Is day night there?”

Dar Oakley shrugged his Crow shrug: this wasn’t his journey. “Well,” he said, “I think it has been. Who knows? It’s not ever the same.”

My old fear of a place of darkness, what I could sometimes think of as my mother’s curse. I thought that whatever else awaited me I wouldn’t be alone: but of course there was no promise even of that. Anyway when we got to the ridge I was leading us to, afternoon was passing. A cold wind off the lake was angering the trees and chilling the heated air.

“It’s only a few steps that way,” I said to Barbara. “Let’s sit and wait a while.”

“Wait?”

“We’ll wait till dark, or near it. So it will be day. Night here will be day there: he told me that,” I said, and looked up. Dar Oakley looked down, mum.

Anyway we waited there for sunset, the three of us wrapped in a blanket against our different chills, and Dar Oakley high on an extended branch of a tree I can’t name. I held Barbara’s fat, warm hand in mine, or maybe it was she who held my hand: both of us conscious that we might lose our nerve, that our resolve might weaken. When the sun was low behind the trees, we stood and went up to the high ledge. I had to be careful of my footing. Barbara, too, sensation in her feet damaged by her diabetes, walking with arms apart as though feeling her way in the dark. But we made it to our place, a wide shelf bald and flat, projecting out over the cliff. Barbara took my hand again. She was weeping softly but not in distress; the little painted head poking out from the carrier made an answering soft moan. I knew we mustn’t linger.

“Itur in antiquam silvam,” I said.

“Amen,” Barbara said.

Dar Oakley with a great cry—defiance? dismay? summons?—rose from his branch and dropped downward through the darkening air, as noble and plain as any being could be. With our own cries—I can hear them still—we too stepped into air.

Immediately it seemed we weren’t falling but climbing down the sheer wall: as though our descending bodies had left our spirits behind to follow after as best they could. It was a long way down; we clung to scragged branches, felt with our feet for the next step.

I didn’t think it would be like this, Barbara said.

We came upon a path that led down between riven blocks of stone, becoming less steep, gradual enough so that at least we could turn and face the way we went. On ahead I could see the Crow watching for us, taking this branch, then that, shaking his wings and tail once, twice, three times, as he always does.

We came out at the end of the narrow passage onto the stony shore of the lake. It was now neither day nor night. The shingle rattled as the low waves came in and drew the stones out, then again pushed them in. It seemed impossible that this shore could be all there was.

Are we there? I called to Dar Oakley.

We are where we are, I heard him call.

Is there more?

Much more, he said. I don’t know how much.

I thought to say that we couldn’t walk very far, the three of us on the ground, but that made no sense, and anyway it didn’t seem hard: it was more like imagining a long walk than taking one. We took the leftward way. As we went on, the shore widened; the sullen lake withdrew, as though wanting nothing to do with us. Dar Oakley once told me how even for him the things on this side, the trees and stones and ground and air, seem filled with conscious intentions, likes and dislikes, no matter that they never are like that for Crows in Ka. But it’s so for People wherever they are, he thinks; and in Ymr what People think is so is so.

We were somehow no longer walking the shore, but had entered a different space, a wood: I thought a Beech-wood, though the light was hardly sufficient to tell. As in all Beech forests, the understory was sparse, the ground bare except for Beech leaves. Silent.

Dar Oakley flew past overhead, black against the gray trees, and seeing him made me feel certain that we were growing closer to where we were destined to go. Then he pulled up, sank, and settled on the forest floor amid the leaves, waiting.

There’s no one, I said to him when I reached the place where he stood, stirring the leaves up in hope of nuts, perhaps. We haven’t seen anyone else. Where are they all?

He looked up and around as though he himself had not noticed that. What I had most feared: a blank place without light or movement, an eternity alone with my two unchanging fellows.

We’re not there yet, he said. It’s all farther in.

He didn’t seem as certain of this as he had before. He rose from the leaves, which flew away rustling from his wing beats, and took a low branch. He doesn’t much like looking upward at me: it’s an old instinct.

Let’s go on, he said.

I can’t say how long we wandered in search of where we were supposed to go or be, but I have one reason, now, to believe it was long and not short. Barbara, aware of (or merely remembering) how hard it was for her to walk, asked us often to stop so she could rest, and we did, but it didn’t seem that she was truly tired, and nor was I. Now and then from behind me I heard her whispering to the child, pausing as though to hear his answers. Times when we walked side by side I told her about Dar Oakley, stories I’d never dared tell her before: like Debra she dislikes Crows, she’d made that clear, and to tell her stories of him—stories I’d claim were his—would have seemed like cruel teasing, or mild madness.

Here, though, she listened; sometimes she laughed, a sound that seemed to displease the place and the trees.

I told her of Dar Oakley’s search for Nothing in the lands of her ancestors (if he had really been there, and they were hers). I told her how he’d crossed the sea with the Terns and she nodded, though she said she had never seen the sea except on TV. I told her how Dar Oakley had tried to bring back his dead mate from the Crow land of death, and she said she thought she’d heard a story like that before, but about a different creature. And all the time Dar Oakley went above and before us, or settled on the fruitless ground to peck, or walked with his Crow head bobbing with each step and pointing his eyes this way and that. Whether he heard or understood I don’t know. I think he had already begun to depart from us. Which seemed right, for he alone (so I thought) was still among the living.

However long it was, we came at length to a final place, for there is one; or there was one for us.

The forest itself hadn’t changed, had changed so little that we might well have been walking all along in great circles, and Dar Oakley couldn’t point us daywise or darkwise here. It had grown more . . . remote, though, and at the same time more familiar, as though we wandered at once from and toward a place we remembered. I don’t know how to say it better. The trees were fewer, stood farther apart, aged and failing. The grass was close-cropped, the tiny saplings nipped off in a way I recognized. Then for a moment a wind of some kind blew through the big trees and lifted their branches—in this place it was as though they gestured softly in many ways with a million palsied hands, and made the wind themselves by their waving.

Deer, Barbara said.

And there were Deer: many Deer, or one Deer repeated many times. They stood at varying distances from us. They weren’t different from the Deer in my backyard and in the field beyond, raising their heads one by one to regard us; great eyes at once mild and alert, musing whether to flee.

The ones we killed, Barbara said. She crossed herself. We shouldn’t of, she said.

I didn’t know whether she meant she and I—I haven’t killed a Deer ever—or we People, or her own kind back through centuries and centuries. The Deer didn’t seem reproachful to me. They looked on us with some intent or expectation, though. And—how was it? We’d turned no new way or taken a new path—there it was before us, the place or point we’d sought, not far off.

It was a door.

Not a space or opening on a path, or the entrance to a farther country; not a gateway, a door. As we came closer to it, it grew larger: a huge, obdurate double door, a portal of the made world, somehow Egyptian in its monumental plainness; tall and rooted in stonework at the base. There was no wall that it made a passage through; it stood all alone, the silent woods all around.

What door is it? Barbara asked.

Yours, I guess, Dar Oakley said.

It was ours. It was the way in, which we had brought forth by our coming to it. It was the door that Anna Kuhn went through as Dar Oakley watched, though this one was not hers. It was the deep well that the Singer and later the Brother had gone down into, the barrow that Fox Cap had sat on to tell her story. But though it was ours—though it was for us—I knew even before I went to it that I couldn’t open it. I went up the shallow steps, which strangely seemed worn away by the passage of feet over a great length of time. There was no handle, knob, or keyhole; the door could only be pushed open or shut. I put my hand on the door on the right side and pressed, and then on the left side, and I couldn’t feel the pressure of my hand on it. I turned away.

Dar Oakley flew to the lintel and settled there. He hopped from jamb to jamb along it, looking down, studying, pondering. For a moment he disappeared, dropping down beyond it, and then appeared again, walking around it. He hopped up the threshold and rapped on the door, rat-tat-tat. For a moment the door seemed to bridle, then became again what it was. Dar Oakley turned to us.

All around it, it’s all the same, he said.

Yes, I said. I thought it would be.

It was pointless to go around it. There was no way to the far land but through it. Barbara went to it and touched it too, and for a moment I hoped, and thought of how the door that Anna Kuhn had gone to had opened wider at her touch; but nothing happened. Barbara thumped the door with her fist. She turned away then and sat down on the wide steps of the sill, and put her elbow on her knee and her cheek in her hand. I thought of saying that if we waited long enough perhaps it would open for us, but I knew it wasn’t so, and it would be no help to say so. Hope had no place here: that’s well known.

We had been refused.

Was it us, something we had not done, some prayer left unsaid? Or was there no room for more, after so many deaths in Ymr, no more souls wanted? We couldn’t know. The dead themselves might no longer be there in that land, might have died a further death and were no more, and even if we had been allowed to enter it, we would have seen only barrenness and Deer.

Who shut this door? Barbara said. Was it them in there who shut it, or was it shut on them?

I didn’t know. I sat down there on the stair too, by the other doorpost. Perhaps the doors hadn’t been shut by those within but by those on this side of it: shut by the pressure of the generality of the living, who nowadays don’t imagine it’s possible to pass through such a door, or no longer need to claim the right of entrance. Alive or dead, you can’t go to heaven or the Isle of the Blessed or any other of the lands of the shades unless you believe that they await you, that the gates are open—or will open for you to pass through in your time.

Was the land of our dead like a shop gone out of business, like a temple whose god has departed and whose priests have abandoned it? It was all I could think.

Well, Dar Oakley called from the lintel. I’ll be going, then.

Wait, I said, alarmed.

I’ve done what I said I would do, he said. Here you are.

But we aren’t allowed in.

Dar Oakley lifted his head and looked this way and that; he made that stance that’s a shrug. He’d done his job.

Where will you go? I asked. Maybe you can’t leave here.

I think I can. I have done, more than once.

And then?

I’ll go find a way to die, he said.

A way to die?

It’s all I want, he said.

But you have. You have died.

No, he said.

A way to die. I knew what he meant: he had died and died, and yet he hadn’t died; he had never died as Crows die, with no remainder, no second self extracted: dead for good, dead as dead.

But where? I asked. I had lost all sense that there were directions, had even forgotten left and right.

Billwise, he said. Far billwise.

North, I said. Why?

He gave me no answer for a time, only opened his bill as though to speak, and did not. Then he told me that the Thing he’d come upon and stolen, the thing that got him in so much trouble, he’d found in Ymr; but he thought that far billwise there are lands beyond or outside of Ymr, or that don’t have Ymr within them; lands where it is as it was in the beginning. Good lands, though, for Crows. Where Ravens still follow Wolves, and Crows follow Ravens. There might be a thing there to find, he said, another thing different from the Thing.

That might take a long time, I said.

It might, he said. It might take long to learn what it is. If it is a thing at all, or something not a thing. I found it for my old mate Kits without knowing it.

He dropped from the door frame and settled beside me on the worn stone.

I have been glad of your company, he said. And for your words to me.

I couldn’t weep here, any more than I could hope. Of course he couldn’t stay: and much as I wanted him by me, I wanted even more that my friend should have what he wanted for himself. Maybe he was right that it could be found where the human incursion—Ymr—was slightest. How could I know? Perhaps he’d have to outlive Ymr altogether: live and die and live again and again until that unceasing querulous wondering irritable voice is at long last stopped. Until all Crows have gone back into Ka and forgotten what they learned of Ymr. Until the People world is reduced to what it was at the start, and there is nothing anywhere but the beautiful, still spirit of a world without thought.

Yet he didn’t go. Gripped himself perhaps by the immobility of this end-time in nowhere. It seemed we might all just sit here forever, grow into great stony immemorial statues: Barbara on one side with a child, me with a Crow on the other, to warn away the souls.

Then he leapt up, startling this world, and rose away, turning this way and that, no way better than another, and with no call he was gone from sight: from my sight. The wood returned to stillness.

Barbara said, What’ll we do now?

I didn’t know. It seemed a question that couldn’t be answered, couldn’t even be asked, not here. Yet there had to be a thing that came next. Even the Deer nibbling the gray grass seemed to be waiting for us to do something. Then from within the denim of the carrier that Barbara wore, the little head of her son appeared, as though waking from sleep. His narrow eyes blinked. His strange smooth lipless mouth opened as though making eating or sucking motions, but it wasn’t that: Barbara leaned close, ear to his face, and then looked to me.

He says go back, she said.

We seemed to go back by the same way we came, but I’ve learned—just as Dar Oakley learned—that here you can never go back the way you came. That you never do anywhere. You only and always go on.

The guide we had now was the infant, who seemed to remember or discern the way. There, Barbara heard him say in his nearly inaudible whistle or whisper, and again There, and it was enough. He went first, peering from his carrier at the way ahead; then Barbara carrying him; then me behind her, now and then taking her shoulder with my hand, fearing with nearly every step that I couldn’t go farther. We reached the stony shore we’d first come along, and now went the other way along it, the water lapping the shore to our left, the heights to our right.

Here, the child whispered at last.

I looked upward. It was impossible to tell if this was the place where we had come down. If it was that place, our coming down seemed impossible. The flat gray light erased dimensions, outcrops, and handholds; it was as unclimbable as a cloud. But we started, now with me ahead, her with the burden of the child following. The means to go up, a place for a foot, a root to grasp, came into being as they were felt for. After a time I found I could reach back when I was secure and pull Barbara and the child up, and then continue. Gray birds fell around us from the heights on silent wings and rose away again. It didn’t seem, though, that we were making much progress; I could see no top to the climb, no sky, it was all blank night that way. Then I began to hear running water: at first a dripping or trickling, then a steadier flowing. The child seemed to hear it too, and began making the same sound.

He’s laughing, Barbara said.

The rocks beneath my left hand were wet, and I worked my way sidewise that way, and the ledge turned inward; a stream falling from the heights had eaten away the clay of the cliff, and formed a series of ledges, almost like steps, not easy to climb but definitely going up. The air grew more variegated—I don’t know what I mean by that, more air-colored, lighter, the glitter of water sweetly clear. From within the chute or tunnel carved by the water I could now look up and see a circle of night sky, maybe moonlight though not the moon.

There, said the child. His mother was weeping again, I couldn’t tell what sort of tears. We kept climbing, climbing up as far as we’d climbed down—which we two, we three, shouldn’t have been able to do. And at length we came out onto the surface of the earth under the night sky and saw the stars again.

I suppose I won’t see Dar Oakley anymore. What I thought I knew of him might not have been what he was, and he has now returned into a world I can’t know. I may not have known him at all; and he might never have cared to know me, or been able to suppose he could. I’ll always listen for him, though, watch for him, and how could I not?

I know now why he wanted not to accompany us, guide us: because he was sure that after our leap from the ledge into death we wouldn’t be able to enter there where we hoped to go, where I had made him promise to take us. Not because that land was closed to us; in a sense we reached it easily enough. No: what he’d tried to make me see is that the only ones who can go to the land of dead People—Ymr—are living ones. Only the living can travel there from here, cross the river, see and speak to those they know or know of, take away its treasures. The living create the Land of Death and its inhabitants by going there, and returning with a tale. But dead People can’t be there, can’t go there or anywhere: they’re dead.

If that’s so, then I went alive to that land if I went at all, and Dar Oakley knew that. How it was possible, whether it was a grace or a curse or Bottom’s dream, well, that’s not to be known. We three went and found Death’s country closed and abandoned. The dead who had once been there, whom we were to join, weren’t there any longer. That’s my tale. But if the land I went toward was mine alone, then it was only within me that those gates were shut.

I understood this when on the night of that following day I awoke from a dream: a dream of going after Dar Oakley, who was winging away from me. I found myself prone in my own bed (because I am indeed alive, alive-o). I lay quiet there so as not to wake the child, who it seems is now my own to care for, he and his mother, too, for as long as I last. I thought of Debra, and saw her bare feet on those gray grasses that I could not step on, saw her moving there as she once did here. And I thought, no, the dead are there, and do know themselves and others. I know it’s so; it can’t be otherwise. To be dead, though, isn’t to have further life like ours, just elsewhere; nor is it to live on in the memories of others, or in the dark aliveness of tombs, or in the voices that the still-embodied believe they hear. It’s not like any story that any traveler to that realm has told, or any spirit claiming to have come out of that land either. No. But I believe that even though their life is divided forever from the life we live in the day and the sun, we can know something of it: because we live part of our lives the way they do, in a realm that’s like the realm where they are. I mean in dreams.

In dreams we traverse other geographies; we walk the roads, we enter the rooms, we speak to the people and beings we encounter. We meet our kin and our dead, just as they were in their youth and in ours, or transfigured, not themselves. We see and hear but can’t quite smell or touch. We know ourselves to be there while we are there, but we don’t know we know: it’s only when we wake that we know what we saw and heard and felt. Usually we know that we saw and felt much more, but we can’t retrieve it, and so the experience of it is lost for good; in effect it was never ours.

And I thought that it must be the same in the sleep of death: there, too, we will do deeds, learn truths, pass through landscapes, meet other souls, think about the living, ponder, feel terror and delight, go always farther. The difference is this: from death we will never, never ever, wake to know of it.

It began to be dawn then as I lay there and the familiar pain began: the pain that tells me for certain that I didn’t go thence as I thought I did, or if I did that I’m not there now. I could hear labored breathing from the spare room. I listened to Crows gathering somewhere not far off, and I slipped from my bed and went to the window in a sort of hopeless hope, or superstition I suppose; but no Crows could be seen. What I thought I could see were the lithe, slow shapes of one or two Deer approaching in the mist: the real and common Deer of this world, as real as pain.

I am returned. We are still here.