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.
CHAPTER THREE
A gray day in the winter lands, smell of rain. Crows walking a stubbled field, finding little enough: rotted grains, Bumblebee’s nest, a dead Mouse. But glad anyway to be where snow and ice don’t reach.