Ka

CHAPTER THREE

For stealing the toe-bone of the Saint and giving it to the Dux his brother; for killing the outlaw with a sword; for going, without permission or preparation, into the Purgatorium of the lake island, where his immortal soul might have been lost; for keeping with him, in spite of all proscriptions, the Crow that had led him astray—for all these things the Brother was sent to the home Abbey of his order, which stood on a far sea island, there to live in solitude and penance for the space of five years.

High on the stone cliffs of that island’s western edge, on the flat stone shelf before his little cell, which looked like a large bee skep but was made of piled stones, the Brother sat chewing a fish-spine with a little goodness left on it and looking down at the beach below, where the waves crashed against the vast blocks of stone and were dissipated, over and over.

“I hate it here,” he said to Dar Oakley. He placed the fish bone before the Crow, who regarded it without joy.

After the hanging of the Wolves gang, when Dar Oakley’d found himself in bad repute with the Crows of that demesne, he decided that beginning again elsewhere might be easier if he followed the Brother, who would at least feed him if he was able. He could have had no conception of what awaited him.

The sea was terrifying. Even after he had snuck aboard the boat that carried the Brother to this island and put out, he couldn’t admit to himself that such a thing as the sea could exist. The blue-black waves topped with white fangs were like no water he’d ever seen, the vicious slap of them on the little boat’s flanks, their salt spittle, the creak of the oars in their locks and the groaning of the frame as though all of it suffered continuously—none of that was as bad as knowing that he was too far from land to return: there were no resting places for a Crow on the sea.

The Brother had once told him: the sea is the water round about the land. Even so Dar Oakley had believed that the land was large and the water was little. But it was the other way. From atop the Brother’s cell on the heights he could look over almost all of the Abbey island; but the sea lying all around went daywise to far shores dim as clouds, and darkwise as far as darkwise goes.

“I will die here before I have done all of my penance,” the Brother said. “And if I do die unshriven, what then? Damnation.”

Dar Oakley did not respond to this, having heard it before, many times. “Someone’s coming,” he said.

A figure with a staff and a bag was toiling over the rocks up toward the Brother’s cell, which was one among three nearly identical cells each facing away from the others. Inside each a Saint prayed and brooded. If they could avoid it, none of the three of them came out when either of the others was out. This visitor could be coming up to any one of them, to lay an offering of dried fish or meat, a loaf, some apples, at the door, and take away a blessing; but the Brother was the most popular of the Saints there, because of the tale he had to tell of the land underground, which grew more circumstantial the more he told it.

“Now she’s stumbled,” Dar Oakley reported, but the Brother didn’t turn to look. It was one of the bad days of his long penance. On some bad days he howled aloud in shame and boredom. “Ah, she’s up again now and coming along.”

With a wing beat he ascended away. Though he featured in the story the Brother told and retold, he knew that his actual presence nearby would be unsettling to visitors. Beneath him as he rose, turning, he could observe one Saint coming out of his cell, only to go immediately back in when the old woman appeared on the rocky track; and the Brother, retreating into his cell to await or avoid her; and the third Saint sitting oblivious on the cliff’s edge, face to the sky.

One Crow alone is no Crows: Dar Oakley was more alone here than the Saints were in their cells. In the island’s interior there were Jackdaws, and there were birds like Crows, who spoke a language Dar Oakley partly understood, and who lived like Crows—but rather than being solidly black, as he was, they were covered on backs and heads with pale-gray plumage. They looked to Dar Oakley like Crows wearing the hooded robes of Brothers. They showed no interest in him, didn’t respond to his calls. Heart-hurt—though he pretended to himself he didn’t care—he went away to where those hooded Crows didn’t usually go: the bare cliffs above the sea.

There were red-billed black birds nesting on the cliffs that might have been Jackdaws of a kind, playing games (he thought) on the fast-moving air. He saw now and then a few pairs of Ravens, flying high in their courtships, unconcerned with others—where they found provender he couldn’t ever learn.

A few People, too, lived by the sea. He’d observed them making their way down the cliffs to the beaches with care, always the chance of a loose stone or a misstep that would bring them tumbling over the sharp rocks; saw the timid young ones creep on their bellies to the edge of a high cliff, put their heads out and look over into the fearful height, in no danger at all of falling but clinging anyway to the turf as though to hold themselves on. He saw People let down on thick hairy ropes from the cliff-top to the ledges, where they gathered eggs or killed birds—sometimes such a one lost his foothold and was left spinning helplessly in air at the rope’s end and looking down.

But the rock-pools and the sea-winds were filled with birds, birds of kinds he’d never seen before, living in ways he couldn’t have imagined. He’d never had much interest in birds not his own kind—Crows do not. He had knowledge of the long-winged predators who had an interest in him; he knew when small birds laid eggs and hatched chicks—there was reason to know. Birds nameless to him had always been hidden in the trees around him; he’d heard their morning and evening chatter. Some were gone in winter, he didn’t know where, and returned from there in spring. He hadn’t pondered them.

These multitudes, though, he’d taken to studying. There wasn’t much else to do.

He loved how the gray-white shriekers, some black-capped, would hang stationary in the wind on their long cupped wings, studying the sea surface, then drop down and dip into the water and come out with a fish. Crows are agile enough, but Dar Oakley couldn’t do that—his wings rose, wanting to try, but he closed them, kept to his perch on the rocks. Black birds with bright-colored heavy bills crowded the rock ledges, so tightly packed together that one coming in to settle knocked off another. Those ones were fishers too. They were all fishers. Out at sea on rocks that lifted their brows above the water (yet sometimes didn’t; Dar Oakley had yet to understand the tides) were long-necked, long-beaked birds that leapt up and dove beneath the water, reappeared with prey, returned to their rocks and stood on long black feet, lifting their heads high for the caught thing to slither down their throats; then they spread their wings, apparently to dry them. Ducks rested placidly on the towering rolls of sea and dabbled as though on a pond. Shorebirds ran after the retreating waves to gobble worms or other food that appeared out of the sand for a moment, then turned to run away on sticklike legs from the next wave rushing up to collapse and sprawl over the sands.

The sea was full of food, if you had the means to get it, which Dar Oakley didn’t. Sometimes the incoming waves, which would never cease to alarm him, would fling onto the beach the bodies of dead fish, or of beasts of the sea as large as Boars, and the ashy-brown seabirds and their like would descend on them, squabbling like Crows, each out for itself—until Dar Oakley got up the courage to hop close and put his bill in, whereupon they’d join together to chase him off. Now and then he’d get a bite, minding his manners and staying at the margins.

And he listened.

Their speech wasn’t his, or like any birds’ he knew. But he began to learn it, and copy it. The pale-gray birds with black caps, the ones he most admired, never squabbled over dead things; they ate only at sea, hovering on wings sharp-angled as a Falcon’s until (like a Falcon) they’d close those wings with delicate precision and plummet toward the water—and into it, with hardly a splash, to emerge in a moment with a silver wriggling something; and again. Their bills were narrow and sharp and bright red. They could spend long times aloft, never tiring, rising and falling on the airs that rose from the cold sea and the sun-heated rocks, and when they gathered on the cliffs, they yakked and shrieked as though laughing together at their own careless prowess. Their words filled him with the same strange pleasure and longing as the Brother’s words for invisible and holy things once had. Now and then one would cast an eye at Dar Oakley on his perch, and take a little notice—he was something they didn’t see always—and he’d beck, and call what to his own ears sounded like their high call: but they couldn’t grasp that, or didn’t care to respond.

Some seabirds had a trick that reminded Dar Oakley of the Crows in his former land: they’d take up shellfish (it had been snails where he came from) and drop them from a height on a carefully chosen rock to break the shells and get the wealth. It was a good game, and it required some nice calculation: drop the thing from too low, and it wouldn’t break; drop it from too high and a thief might slip in and get to the tidbit before you could.

Dar Oakley had been a player back home, and (he thought) not so bad a one either. The way to play was to pretend no interest, peck around nearby looking elsewhere, but ready to take flight as soon as the shell was dropped. The things the dirt-colored birds dropped were strange to him—black or gray, some like pebbles that seemed to contain nothing, others large and hard that needed a big fall, allowing time for a snatch: like that one just now.

He played it perfectly: the shell of the thing—whatever it was—cracked neatly on the flat rock, bounced once, and came apart, and Dar Oakley was there and had the salty bit and was away before the shrieker was close. It was too fat and sloppy to swallow in flight, and a fragment of shell was stuck to it, he’d have to settle somewhere out of sight—

Dar Oakley sensed more than saw the bird closing on him, not from above but from below—what? Who? Not the original possessor of the shellfish. Its head came into sight near his—a long white head, a bill hooked like a predator’s, it snapped at him as Dar Oakley banked away, evading. Were there birds here that caught and ate other birds? He hadn’t thought so. But this cold-eyed one was certainly big enough. Bill clamped on his morsel, Dar Oakley couldn’t cry threats at it; he dropped low, but so did the other, a strong flier, better than he. He banked, rose, fell. The big bird followed, harrying; when its face came unbearably close to his, Dar Oakley couldn’t help opening his mouth to shriek, losing his bit of breakfast, which the other bird snatched as it fell.

It instantly lost all interest in the Crow, and winged away. Dar Oakley glimpsed its yellow eye, dulled now, job done.

He had been chased out over open water by the robber, and turning back now toward the shore, he saw a band of the red-billed birds on a pillar of rock. They were laughing extravagantly—at him, Dar Oakley was sure.

Skua! they shouted. Skua! Then laughed some more.

Dar Oakley, exhausted, hungry, afraid of the sea below, let himself fall toward those rocks poking out of the waves like People’s towers. He’d seen birds of different kinds ganging together there; why not he? He got a grip on a perch slimy with white droppings, looked around, and laughed himself. Ka ka ka ka! Funny! Fooled me! He tried out the sound they’d made, and the red-bills, delighted, called back: Skua, they cried, and nodded at one another.

It was the first word of their language Dar Oakley learned; Skua, the name of the robber-bird. He’d learn more soon enough.

Skua is what my bird book calls that bird that lives by harrying others into dropping their catches. A Skua will take eggs and baby birds if it can, but what it’s known for is driving close to the head of a Gull or Puffin or other bird, causing it to shriek in fear or anger and lose what it holds. It might be a Norse name—but the red-bills’ own name for it, which Dar Oakley shouted in telling me the story, sounds enough like Skua to my ears that I’ve used it. The next name he learned—the name the birds called themselves—is one I can’t spell out, but I can give the name they have in Ymr: they were Terns. More exactly, they were Arctic Terns, pausing there on their long yearly voyage. The way they live, the story of their life, is as remarkable to me as it was to Dar Oakley learning of it then. It hasn’t changed. And unlike many other stories he’s gathered from here and there, from then and now, from People and from birds and beasts, theirs is true. If it weren’t, Dar Oakley would likely not have come across the sea to here.

He never could learn to tell one Tern from another, and wondered sometimes whether they could tell themselves; or, if they could, whether they cared, whether it mattered to them. Crows flock, Crows gang, but they have freeholds they defend and families they know. The Terns all lived together, flung in a great rippling swathe over the cliffs, calling together, ascending and descending in waves. They thought it was hilarious to have him among them on their whitened rocks, big and black and slow and stupid—for we always think that those who don’t know what we know are stupid.

What is your kind? they asked him, again and again.

Crow, he’d say.

No, no, not you, not you a Crow!

Yes.

A Crow of what kind?

My kind.

Where are your kin, your ones, your others?

Far away.

They laughed and laughed to hear that: far away. They called it to other Terns, and they laughed too. For what could any Crow know of far away?

When he began to learn their language and imitate it, he heard enough to know that they weren’t always here, that this wasn’t their home, only a stop on an immense journey from world’s end to world’s end.

Does the world have an end?

Yes, yes, they cried, oh yes, two ends, one end at each end, the end and the other end. Did you think you could go on forever ever? No, not!

They told Dar Oakley how Terns went from far to far, from one end of the world to the other. From the end they’d come from, all the way to the end to which they went.

They told Dar Oakley that if you go as far as they, you come at last to where billwise ends, and the land of the end of the world is all made of ice. And if you go the other way till the other way ends, a land all ice again.

Why not just stay here? he asked.

No! Too cold, too lean!

Then why go to lands of ice?

They told him—they argued and shrieked so that he could barely understand, much less believe—that in summer the ice lands are warm, and that’s because summer goes down the world day by day until it reaches the farthest lands. Did he know how the sun stays long in the sky in summer, or was he too dull to have noticed? Well, there in the ice lands, in the depths of summer, the days are so long that the sun never sets at all. They believed—though they are never there to see it—that in the days when the sun never sets in the billwise land of ice, it never rises at all at the world’s other end. Always day for Terns! Nice!

Dar Oakley said that such a thing couldn’t be, no matter how big the world was. It couldn’t be.

Oh yes! Great lands to billwise! they cried. Lands darkwise, too, that can’t be crossed, too big. So big a world. And Terns everywhere to tell about it. They laughed to see him baffled. Lifted by their laughter as on the sea-wind, they rose away from him to go to sea and feed, lifting his heart away with them.

It’s the longest seasonal migration in the kingdom of the birds: this I’ve learned. When autumn comes, the Arctic Terns set out from nesting grounds within the Arctic Circle, go out over the islands of the North Atlantic where Dar Oakley encountered them, down along the coast of Africa and out over open sea for a thousand miles to Antarctica, where spring will have just come. The seas are rich with food. There they molt entirely and regrow their plumage. As the days grow shorter in March, they return as they went, and reach the summer lands of the North. There, at the edge of the ice, they lay their eggs in scrape-hole nests on the ground, and when the young are fledged and the days grow short, they all fly south, adults and young, on their circling journey.

Summer does move down across the world, as the Terns told Dar Oakley. And the Terns move with it, and have done so forever.

Once long ago—Dar Oakley only remembered this for the first time there by the sea—he had told an older Crow that one day he, Dar Oakley, would travel so far from his demesne that he would come to a place where no Crows are. And the older bird had told him there was no such place. But there was, and it was more of the world than all the Crows everywhere possessed.

Still he couldn’t tell whether the tales of the Terns made the world seem larger, or actually smaller. The world’s ends were so far apart that the thought of it caused a hole to open in his heart if he thought of it incautiously. Yet the same stories made the world a world; it had ends; these little birds crossed it, laughing as though it were easy.

Meantime, down on the sands of the long beach that ran below shattered rocks, Dar Oakley saw the Brother often, sitting with the ones who went out in boats to the sea to catch fish, unsuited as People were to that business. The Brother had been consigned to silence, but he seemed to have forgotten that: he talked as much as he listened, making sweeps of his arms toward the sea, or holding them apart as though they held something huge. Dar Oakley could see his jaw wagging. It had always cost the man: talking and not listening.

Another morning, coming from the Terns’ cliff side with his head full of the Terns’ tales, he saw the Brother helped aboard one of the People boats and carried out to sea: the oarsmen pulling at the slender oars, the boat lifted almost upright on the surf and then riding low and purposefully on the calmer waters farther out. Dar Oakley wondered if he’d come back—if he wanted to, if he would be able to.

But there he was at sunset toiling up the path to his cell, a string of fish and a grin on his face. The bald strip on his head was fiercely red from the sun.

“Corve,” he called, waving. “Signs and wonders. Come eat.”

The Saints had a plot of ground where they had planted beans in rows—there was so little soil on this rocky land that the People of the island had long ago made soil for the Saints from beach sand mixed with seaweed. So there were beans and fish to eat, and cresses that grew along a little stream that issued from the well where they got their water. A fire pit where they cooked when it didn’t rain, which wasn’t often.

“There are lands to the West, Corve,” the Brother said. “The fishermen know it, though few have ever reached them.”

“Yes,” Dar Oakley said. “Great lands, billwise and darkwise. North and West.”

“Yes.” The Brother stirred fish-guts and meal to cook for the Crow, and laid his own fish on the hot stones. “Some say that the sea goes on forever, or to the world’s edge. No.”

“No,” said Dar Oakley. “A few days’ flight billwise there is land. Islands, one after another, like this one. Or different.”

“The Isles of the Blessed lie that way,” the Brother said, gesturing to where the declining sun hid behind clouds. “A land promised to the Saints, where no one dies.”

“A land where the sun never sets, or never rises.”

“A great Dux went that way. He went in a three-hide boat with a cohort to row. He came to islands where there is no death.”

“Lands made of ice that never melts away,” Dar Oakley said. “Summer is warm there but the ice remains. There they make their nests and raise young.”

As though just then realizing that the Crow had all this time been speaking to him, the Brother said, “Who does?”

“The Terns,” Dar Oakley said. “The Terns with the sharp red beaks.”

The Brother considered this, eyes looking inward as though trying to remember ever seeing such a bird.

Perhaps attracted by the smell of the frying fish, one of the other Saints came forth, the large, long-armed one whom Dar Oakley had been told was a female, though it was hard to see that—she was beardless and wore the same robe as the others, but her hair, though cropped short, wasn’t shaved across her head. She sat without speaking, and the Brother gave her half a fish on a flat stone.

“This Dux,” he said. “He traveled many days, perhaps it was months. He saw an island of giant Ants, and an island where great Horses ran a race forever. Fierce seabirds attacked his company, but they were fought off. They saw a great demon riding in a carriage over the surface of the sea, as easily as you might across a field.”

“Bran,” said the female Saint. “It was Bran who went that way.”

“He came to a land of Joy,” the Brother said. “Where everyone laughed all the time. A land of Grief, where they never ceased weeping.”

“Or maybe it was someone else,” said the female Saint.

Since the Terns had told him of none of those islands, Dar Oakley kept silent. The other Saint, a long, lean one, had come up and now stood motionless, listening.

“Then he came to an island,” the Brother went on. “It was always spring there. Great fruits grew on every tree. The sun never set, springs of sweet water never failed. Women and boys of great beauty sang God’s praises all the endless day.”

“Yma,” said the third Saint. “The Isle of the Blessed.” The ball in his throat—his gizzard, Dar Oakley thought of it, though it was a different thing—wobbled. The Brother had told him that this Saint came from the land over the short sea to the East of this island, where the People suffered greatly from sadness and longing.

“Paradise,” said the female Saint. Her beardless chin was greasy with fish. “The good souls go there. The innocent, who never sinned.”

“But this Dux,” the Brother said, “went there alive as you and me.”

“You can’t,” the female Saint said. “In no boat of this world.”

It had begun softly to rain.

“Listen,” the Brother said, and tapped his breast. “I went down in this flesh into the land of the damned souls. In this flesh I will go West to the land promised to the Saints, and see it too.”

The female Saint snorted, and arose, drawing her hood over her head. The other Saint seemed reluctant to leave, squatting by the fire where fats and raindrops sizzled. But after looking long out to the cloud-occluded West, he too went away.

In his dank cell the Brother wrapped himself in his sole possession, an ancient, mangy robe of Wolf-skin that his brother the Dux had given to him. Dar Oakley found the sight of the fur moving in the darkness of the cell unsettling.

“That Dux returned over the sea to his own land,” the Brother said, seeming near sleep, “and when his boat neared the shore, one of his companions, homesick, leapt from the boat and swam to land. But when he climbed out onto the sands, his body crumbled all to dust and bone, as though it had lain there a hundred years. The Dux called from the boat, telling them who he was, and where he had gone. None of them remembered him or his name, but they said that long, long before, a great Dux then living thereabouts was said to have set out on such a journey, and never returned.”

Dar Oakley in the little window said nothing.

“Yet that was he, the same man who had gone out.”

“Would that happen to you,” Dar Oakley asked, “if you went out that far and returned? Crumble into dust?”

“I wouldn’t return,” the Brother said. “Not ever.”

They were still for a time. The clouds broke and began to part.

“Corve,” the Brother said. “How do the Terns know how to cross the sea?”

“They know. They go—” Now which word was the People word for billwise? “They go North,” he said. “And . . . West.”

“How do they know these ways? Do they study the stars, or . . .”

“They know,” Dar Oakley said. “It’s clear. I know.”

“You do? Always?”

“Yes.”

The Brother said no more then. But the Wolf-skin heaved like a big beast, and heaved again. The Brother murmured his long prayers, and listening, Dar Oakley fell asleep.

For a long time thereafter the Brother and the others talked about a journey to the West and the land promised to the Saints, but only as though to determine if it was right or wrong to go there, or even to hope to go there; whether such a land could be, whether God would permit such lands to exist at all, and if they did exist, who might inhabit them, and in what state, in the body or not, exalted or not.

Of course they had each made a vow not to talk at all about anything, except at need. But they did. And talking felt itself like a voyage.

“If,” the Brother posited, tapping the finger of one hand into the palm of the other, “if we are meant for heaven, why should we have to pass through death to reach it? Don’t we want to enter into that place without going down into the grave? For great Austin said: it’s what all men want, and what the soul wants too.”

“Christ died,” the female Saint answered. “And went down into Hell, and returned to earth and life again.”

“Which is to say,” the Brother said, “you may go down into the darkness and suffer the pains of Hell, and come back from there in this flesh alive. So why may we not go to paradise in this body, and come back alive? Why would God not want that for us if we can gain it? He made that land as he made all things. Not to keep it from us.”

“This,” the third Saint let them know, “was asserted by a great theologus of my own country: God will save all men, and wishes to. But his opinion has been condemned.”

The female Saint said, “We are here on earth, all of us, to ready ourselves for death. So that it doesn’t come upon us when we are still in sin, our penances uncompleted.”

“Not me,” the third Saint said.

“So then,” the Brother responded, “if those lands could be found when the soul is still in the body, death couldn’t take you unawares. For once there, you—I mean a person, whatever person—wouldn’t die. If the tales are true.”

The female Saint argued that when the person returned, there would still be death and the penance awaiting.

“But,” the skinny Saint would say, “if all that’s so, then once we—once a person—got there alive, to Isle Yma, so called in our tongue, would he want to come back at all?”

And at that the Brother sat back, hands on his knees, and smiled on them, as though they had learned a lesson, or got the point of a story.

Dar Oakley, who neither wanted to go there nor believed he could return, thought of asking whether there were any Crows in that place, or those places; but he supposed he knew the answer. If a Crow could be there, it wouldn’t be the place they spoke of and hoped for. His presence, the presence of a single Crow, could spoil it all.

Death-bird. Memento mori, the Brother sometimes called him, words of the other, the special language. But it was they, People, who concerned themselves with death. All a Crow wanted was to live: wanted it in so deep a part of him it couldn’t be found or named or spoken.

Provisions at the place of the three beehive cells grew so scarce in winter that Dar Oakley’d become a seabird. He couldn’t dive like the Terns or chase the receding waves like the Sandpipers; he didn’t join the crowds of Gulls who harried the People boats as they came in at evening, pecking at the catch and shrieking at one another; but he took his turn at the guts and the sea-flesh the fishers didn’t want and flung on the sand. The Gulls by now paid him no attention, seemed not to notice him, or yelled at him only as much as they did at their own kind.

The fisher People would draw up their boats on the broad beach of a sheltered cove, turn them over onto piles of flat stones, to keep them dry; go over them with care, heal the wounds in their hides with hooked needles and gut, spread old butter and seal fat over the lapped seams to keep out water. New boats were made here as well, of wood and hides. Dar Oakley kept watch on one being built down the cove well up from the waterline, a boat of a kind—though Dar Oakley couldn’t know it—that hadn’t been built before on this island, where every boat was the same as every other.

He could see that it was going to be large, very large. A big crowd of People was at work on it, coming and going through the days with long wicker staves and stiff cowhides tanned with oak-bark and other things necessary. The Saints came to watch over them, and on the White Stone days the Brother fed them with bits of white bread where they knelt on the sand, putting the morsels into their open mouths like a mother bird feeding young. No work was done on the boat on those days; the Saints and the fishers told tales, and drew figures with sticks on the smooth sand, and pointed this way and that out to sea.

The Brother’s plan was getting into the heads of others, more every day, old and young.

The great boat was being built with its bottom upward. The bar that ran around the boat’s edge, which the fishers would grip when at sea, was laid down first, making a shape tapering toward the front. The arches of the ribs were raised over this frame and fastened to it in a way that Dar Oakley couldn’t perceive. That took many days. The growing boat resembled a collapsed Whale’s skeleton, except that instead of falling in, it was growing up as more ribs were stuck on. Then when the skeleton was complete its skin was put on, in about the time it would take for a dead Whale’s to fall away. That was the cowhides they laid over it, and then treated to keep water out: giving it by hand what the Terns and Gulls were born with.

There was a skinny boy who had been taken as a slave by coastal raiders, was ransomed by the Brothers of the Abbey, and now served them in the kitchens—Dar Oakley never learned his name. He had spent his growing-up on boats and galleys, and of all the island People he was readiest to be off with the Saints to lands that weren’t this one, or at least to go to sea and not come back. When the boat was done to the islanders’ standards, he protested, No, no, no, to go far it would have to be like the boats he’d known, which he’d helped to build, that flew over the sea’s hills and valleys faster than any of theirs; and he danced and spoke in their tongue as best he could and made things of sticks that would show the head shakers and laughers what to do. But the Saints knew what he meant: a naviculam, a barca, a navis longa. They were shown in books.

So that was how the Boat of the Saints got a mast stepped amidships with a square sail hung from a yardarm and handled with ropes rigged port and starboard. And a stern-mounted rudder with a long tiller arm to turn the ship—for now it was a ship—into the way it must go: all carved from precious oak and bound in iron and blessed many times.

The winter was passing, the prevailing winds shifting: Dar Oakley, seabird, felt it. By the time the great boat was finished, the Terns were beginning to leave for the lands of ice and warmth. A kind of fever or passion had come over them, and Dar Oakley found it hard to get their attention. He wondered if what they felt now was like what Crows feel when a winter roost breaks up in spring and the families depart to build nests again and make more Crows—but it must be different, for these birds went from summer to spring to summer.

Yes, yes, yes, they cried to him, yes, we go.

He asked them, Is there really a big land to darkwise, far, far off? Not only sea islands?

Oh yes, big lands, lands with no sea beyond them, we don’t go look but we know. Terns say so.

And the islands that lie that way, Dar Oakley said. Is there one of giant Ants? Is there one where Horses run without stopping?

What is Ant? they shouted, laughing. What is Horse?

They knew nothing of the earth or its beasts, and cared nothing for it but that it bordered the sea, as a Crow cares nothing for the sea but that it borders the earth.

But they had said it: land to the West. He couldn’t ask them if springs never failed there, or if the trees bore fruit all the time and their leaves never turned and fell: they’d know nothing of such things.

If People wanted to go there, he asked them, to the great lands darkwise, how would they go?

How the winds go! Billwise, billwise! Island to island. Cross the waters between, rest there, go again! Cross the long sea billwise-darkwise! Reach that land.

They can’t, Dar Oakley said. They don’t know which way it is. Only if they can see sun or stars and guess.

The Terns found that so hilarious their cries drowned out Dar Oakley’s questions, and most of them went away, having got their laughs. But a few remained.

Could you guide them, though? Dar Oakley asked. If they could follow you—I suppose you’d get nothing out of it, but—

How can we? one said, one of those who’d chased the Skua that chased Dar Oakley. We fly high, high over the long sea. How can we see them? Little specks down on the water, how tell one from another?

Well, Dar Oakley said.

You, cried the Tern. You, you, you we know. When we see you flying? We come help!

The bird lifted off the rock and mimed the scene: Fly, look down, cry out Ah!, come down.

We come! said another. Maybe we come.

We look, look, look out for you! Crow of your kind, only one of you! We will see you later! Good-bye!

He watched them go off from the sea-cliff, one’s departure lifting the next and the next out over the water. He seemed to see the Saints far away on the same water, clinging to their boat, in danger of death and failure.

On the beach People stood around the great boat, not at work, waiting, as though for the thing to move on its own.

He would have to go with them, that was all. Billwise-darkwise against the winds, to the land that he could likely never enter, just so that the Saints wouldn’t die before they got there and all go down into the Down forever.

Myself, I thought—and I told Dar Oakley this—that he had to go with them because he had once stolen from People the thing the Saints were really going in search of: endless life, the Most Precious Thing. It had been theirs, not his, and though he’d lost it, he kept it still; he couldn’t shed it, nor give it away. But perhaps it could be found again.

He told me no, that wasn’t it; he said that if he told it that way, it would seem he knew more of his story, and of himself, than he did. All he knew then was that he must go.

The Brother, of course, had assumed all along that Dar Oakley would go with him. The Brother believed that Dar Oakley was his.

So they stood on the edge of the River Ocean and looked toward the far bank, which no one they knew had ever seen or stepped upon. Morning had risen, but the West into which they would go was still dark. Their boat lay up on the sands, and all the stores and goods, the leather bags of water and milk, the furnishings for Mass, the smoked fish, the blessed crucifixes, the Saints’ relics, the woolens and furs, were piled up by it to be put in.

When they had prayed, they all chose new names to go out with on the sea.

“I’ll be Bridget,” the female Saint said.

“I’ll be Bran,” said the Brother, and struck his breast, as though to put the new name into his heart.

“I will be Dylan,” said the third Saint with a little sob. “Powerful in swimming, lord of the sea.”

“I will be Bran too,” said the kitchen-boy, and he balled his fists and stuck out his chin; but he wasn’t allowed. They let him be Little Bran, Branan.

Dar Oakley was given no name; he had never told his name to the Brother. (I suppose no one on that day said that in the language of the sea-island People, Bran means Raven, a bird that many of the People believed Dar Oakley to be.) The four fisher People who had elected to go with the Saints kept their names, or at least never spoke up to change them.

When all that was done and the stores readied, the boat had to be brought to the water. Four fisher People could carry a little boat to water by crawling beneath it and lifting it by the gunwales onto their backs; seeing them stumble down the beach had made Dar Oakley think of a dark, many-legged sea-beast. But the new boat couldn’t be carried that way; it was too large and long. So all the People, male, female, child, picked up the boat with their hands under the gunwales and all lifted and carried it together to the water.

Turning the big boat upright without losing it on the water or holing the bottom on the shingle took some labor and scolding. When it was right side up (Dar Oakley marveling again, always, at the cleverness of People with their things, how they thought it all out, what would happen if it were done this way, or that way, how to make the ends they envisioned come to be the ends they got), the fisher People and the kitchen-boy stepped the mast and fixed the yardarm and the tied-up sail and put the tiller in the notch made for it and secured it. The others waded to the boat with supplies and stowed them, what should be near at hand, what could lie down deeper. Day was full. On the sands and on the headland above, more People had assembled to see the beginning of this voyage that they couldn’t know the end of. Dar Oakley watched them point and talk and shake their heads side to side as People did when puzzled or doubtful.

Lastly, the Saints boarded and the oars were put in the oarlocks; Dar Oakley was taken aboard, borne on Brother Bran’s fist like a Dux’s Hawk, and set like a figurehead on the prow. His part was to point them to the islands of the North, and when those islands were passed, over the empty sea to the West.

All the People had come down onto the beach, and many waded into the water to push the heavy-laden boat out to sea. Feeling the sudden free rise and fall of it, his heart cold with fear, Dar Oakley made the call Ka, and the Saints called too, and the People, already falling behind, cheered. Ka, Dar Oakley cried, thrashing his wings mightily: a challenge flung into far Ymr, where anything might be.

It’s an ancient tale, an old possibility, or impossibility. Not so far away from where I now live are the dim remains of stone structures that are said to resemble similar ones on the other shore. Tablets marked with what might be runes that no People who later came here knew or used. Why do we wish it might be so? Do I wish it were so? If I do, it’s only because those Saints, if they really did come, went back again having done no harm; and so the People of this land were left alone till another thousand years had passed. Only one member of the party that set out that day came and stayed, and he’s still here as I write. Just now he’s regarding the day out my window, after a breakfast of spoiled liver. He is that one and he is not that one, and of course his stories are also only stories. And actually he can’t tell me if the Saints and the Companions ever made it even this far.

They sailed first toward islands that the People had long been able to reach: where fish could be caught in good weather, where small settlements had long ago been built. The Brother warned them that all those on such islands would be pagans (Dar Oakley didn’t know what variant of People this word described), but as they came near one tiny island they heard a bell rung; and when they found an inlet where the boat could be run in, they saw far-off a Brother in white. But on seeing them, this Brother went away up the rocks and out of sight, and the voyagers were disappointed. They spent the night in the boat. In the morning Dar Oakley was sent out over the island to see if he could find a church and dwellings, but when he returned, the Brother couldn’t understand his report. The fisher People observing their exchange said nothing, but it was clear they thought the Crow was either a lying demon or just a bird.

There was no reason to stay. They climbed up to where they saw a spring in a cairn of stones, and filled their water-skins, and went on. Green water changed again to blue. Dar Oakley pulled in his head and blinkered his eyes against the salt spray. That island had borne a crown of trees; he’d heard birds. Should he have quit when he had the chance?

They knew, from sailors’ tales passed down and from the Brothers’ books, certain places they would likely come upon on the deep sea. There was an island, no one knew quite where, to which the pagan dead had once been carried on boats handled by living People, who crossed from the western lands with their pale passengers to the isle of the dead in a single night—their boats seemingly empty but sunk almost to the gunwales with unhappy souls, who could be heard wailing as they went. Once, on a starless night, they in the Saints’ boat did for a moment hear something, some sound, come over the faintly glowing sea. Not Dar Oakley, though. Prayers were said.

Also, in a certain place in the sea there lies the enormous sleeping body of a Mermaid who floats forever there. Farther that way, toward the northernmost lands, there is a black mountain island of monstrous Smiths, who keep huge fires burning; and ever and ever they beat their iron and the sparks fly up into the smoky sky.

Dar Oakley remembers the Mermaid, lying still and as white as sea-foam. The People exclaimed and pointed to her, afraid that they might wake her, but when they came close enough, it was clear to them that she wasn’t sleeping but dead, and indeed had been dead for so long that she had turned to stone: her great closed lids and her scaly tail and her breasts, all stone. Dar Oakley, who’s never been able to perceive the likenesses of People that People see everywhere, saw only a long, low, bare white island.

At the island of the Smiths they saw the fires, and the sparks from the forges flung into the smoky air, and they smelled a dreadful smell; hot stones fell from the mountain into the sea and steamed. But they saw no Smiths.

“This is a place thrown up out of Hell,” the Brother said. “I was there, I suffered, I was judged. A thousand thousand damned souls were thrust into that fire.” But they couldn’t see any damned souls, either.

They came in sight of a small white island too bright in the sun even to look at steadily. When they came nearer to it, they saw that it breathed cold breath continuously as though alive, and they wondered if it was a great shapeless beast, like no beast they had ever seen; but when they reached it and pulled in under an overhang of it so close they could touch it, they found it was all made of ice: its breath was cold evaporation. Chunks of ice floated in the sea around their boat. They pulled in several and found them to be sweet water, broke them, and put the pieces in their leather water-skins.

They came into a pod of Whales of huge size. One rose almost underneath them, all covered with warts and scuttling crabs and seaweed, and regarded them with a piggy eye. It blew out its warm breath from its head, which fell on them like a shower of rain.

“Suppose,” the female Saint said, “we were to mistake it for an island, and put ashore there.”

Everyone laughed.

“And suppose we spent the night on its back,” said the other Saint, Dylan. “How would that be?”

“And we lit a fire there!”

They laughed more.

“And the Whale felt the heat in his hide, and sank beneath us, and carried us down under the sea!”

At that the Whale, as though offended at being talked of that way, did sink away; his huge tail lifted and spanked the water and wetted them all. They were silent then, and sorry it was gone, and the sea empty again.

He can tell me now, Dar Oakley can, where they were when they met the Whales, or when any island was reached—or rather he can tell me that he knew where he was: in what direction the Abbey island lay, and the daywise land from which he had come at first with the Brother to that island to do his penance; where the black mountain of fire lay, which way to go to return to where they had come from. But he has no map: no sense of how far they went, how many days or weeks they traveled, how long they spent on this shore or that, what distance they traveled until they came to the Paradise of the Birds.

By then it was midsummer, and as the Terns had promised, the sun didn’t set—or hardly set. It approached the world’s edge slantwise, as though unwilling to dip itself into the dark; and when it slid beneath the sea it soon came out again, and began to climb a long, low loop to its zenith and then to its setting-place again. Darkwise and daywise here weren’t toward night and day: but still Dar Oakley knew where he was.

They had been far from land for an unmeasurable time, alone with the hiss of the water over the hull and the dull snap of the sail. They followed where Dar Oakley pointed, but where he pointed was more like nowhere at all than anywhere he had ever been. The sea was everything and he was nothing. The sea—it couldn’t be so but he felt it to be so—desired his nonexistence; it was like an Owl or a Falcon and meant to destroy him in order to increase itself.

Then before dawn there were birds. The sailors couldn’t see them but Dar Oakley could; he left his place on the yardarm and flew toward the specks he saw here and there against a curdled sky. When he was high enough above the sea he saw more, darting, flitting, like leaves torn from winter trees. A strange hope filled him. More birds, seeming to be gathering toward a space of sea as faceless as any other. He called down to the Companions: Follow!

It was the Terns. Through the day the boat of the Saints passed among them as they dove at the water’s surface and delicately plucked out fish, swallowed and returned or carried their catch away. There were other birds too, but not for Dar Oakley. He called and called, but not even the strange boatful of People seemed to interest them, only the wealth in the water. The fisher People pulled out their dragnet and fished too, laughing and tugging while the Saints pressed their hands together, looked upward, and gave thanks. What care God took of these his creatures, to feed them in the middle of the sea! For how could birds have found this rich place without his guidance?

Over and over through that day and the next Dar Oakley went up, crying out words he knew in the Terns’ language. But the cloud of Terns was too thin, too far-spread—they had made a place here where there was no place, but it was a huge place. He looked up, down, around, thinking he might see one he knew—but had he ever known one, been able to tell one of them from another?

He heard laughter.

He looked up. Terns were above his head, floating effortlessly. They were laughing at him.

One flew down close to him. Crow of your kind! it cried. Are you?

Others came near, stalling and hovering and looking into his face. Crow of your kind! We know of you! Terns, Terns have told, if you see Crow, help, help! Here we are!

They flitted away, apparently expecting him to follow. Other Terns came around him to laugh. Stop flap flapping, Crow of your kind! they said. Rise up, winds go your way! But he beat on, slow and awkward amid their dance; they couldn’t know that Crows can only coast briefly on air. He hoped they wouldn’t grow bored with him and fly away. He coasted, sank, beat, rose.

All this time—Dar Oakley just then became aware of it—he and the boat of the Saints had been drifting apart. The strong current was bearing them one way, the wind above bore him another. Unless he dropped right now and beat toward it with all the strength he had, he’d be left out over the water with nowhere to land. He had to, right now.

Then he felt the oddest thing.

A Tern had come up beneath him, and bumped gently against his belly. Birds never touch in flight! Then another did the same. They were driving him—in fact they were bearing him—upward. These little birds—he weighed as much as four of them. When one tired, another came in, crying, Up! Up!

What did they want, what were they doing? Carrying him up: to stop the beating of his wings, to lay him on the wind. They wanted him to fly as they did, use the wind as they did; they thought it was easy. This high sea wind: he perceived it suddenly as a being, a being around him, the wind, and a friend of theirs. And if he just stopped beating, that being might support him for a time, yes, if he pushed out his wings, yes, like this, the tips curled upward like a soaring vulture’s, and let the wind sweep over them—make the wind sweep over them, or ask it to. He’d flown all his life and never thought he might change the way he did it. But he’d better, for now he was hopelessly far from the boat, a tiny thing bobbing on the water far away. He was exhausted: rations had been short, he was wasted to nothing, which was perhaps what helped him stay aloft, a weightless black scrap on the wind. Hold me, take me.

And out of the morning mists that the wind pulled away he saw land. A low blue-black island that might have been a cloud bank but wasn’t, was certainly not. The Terns were flitting and streaming toward it past him, and Dar Oakley could perceive other birds too homing in on the place.

Just lie on the wind: all he could do or tell himself to do. The Terns stayed with him, unconcerned, diving down now and then to fish, calling cheerful insults to one another. Beat once, no more; then once again. It was clear he’d have to fall down through the contrary airs stirred up by the sea and the lump of land before he could reach a landing, and his strength was nearly gone. But that bare point, there, reaching out toward him—the Terns and others didn’t care for it, it seemed, but it was as far as he could go, if he could go that far. The sea smashed against it, pointlessly furious as always, maybe about to have him for itself at last. But no: he made it, tumbling down onto stone, bleak stone, alive. For a long time he lay unmoving, bill open, wings splayed like a dead Crow’s, barely breathing, feeling his heart run. Run, heart, run, just stay within me.

After a time of not-being he felt movement around him, and sounds, and he thought that if there were predators here he was done for, and it wasn’t worth even opening his eyes to see something he couldn’t fight off. Then a sharp tap on his bill woke him fully. Terns around him; they laughed to see him startled. One hopped close on its weak little legs and thrust a piece of something into his mouth. Food. Fish. Something. He swallowed, and they laughed and nodded at each other, and one came with more food.

They were feeding him. They had brought him to this safety, and now they were feeding him.

It was against every instinct of self-preservation that the world obeyed, the instinct that ruled all beings, even People. It was the only time in all his existence that beings not of his own kind and close kin had given help to him with no advantage to themselves, anyway no advantage that he could imagine, and it would never happen again. He swallowed. He got more. They came and went from the rock they had borne him to; they seemed even to compete to be the ones who fed him. It was how the Brother said People should be and never were.

They wanted him to fly. Fly, Crow of your kind! Up, up! When he roused at last, they urged him to follow, follow them, follow from the little point to the long beaches and high cliffs farther darkwise, all crowded with birds, raucous with birds. Dar Oakley once aloft could see the long bitten coastline running on farther than his sight could reach, and glistening heights that went up into the day and the sun. This was no sea island but a great land, the one the Terns had told him of: the place of the warm sun in the land of ice. As he came close, he saw that all over the scrubby earth beyond the shingle, in the grass and sand, Terns were raising young: the gray fuzzy chicks were everywhere, just able to toddle out of the shallow nest-holes, waving stubby wings. So many. The adults coming in a steady stream to feed them—how could they tell which were their own? Did they know, or did they just push sustenance into any open mouth they saw? If they all did that, would all the young be equally fed? Or was he wrong and each mother and father recognized each little beaky face as one of their own? He didn’t know, and doesn’t know now.

They went on feeding him, though his strength had returned. He couldn’t fish for himself, which seemed evident to them, and they brought him fish and dropped them before him, even tried to stuff them in his mouth. They fed him like a chick of theirs. Certainly they hadn’t mistaken him for one; what caused them to do it? There was no word in the language of Crows to describe it; he thought there would be no need for such a word in the language of the Terns. And it wasn’t that he didn’t need or want their care: as far as he ventured back beyond the sun-warmed rocks and beaches, food was scarce—not much for Crows, and no Crows either that he saw, though he glimpsed a great Snowy Owl and wondered how it lived.

Each day when they went to sea he’d ask the Terns to look for the boat of the Saints, and they said, Yes, yes, look, look, see, but he wasn’t sure they understood him. He had enough seamanship to know that if the boat found its way to this shore, it would need an inlet where they could put in: a cove or the emptying of a river, a bay protected by outer banks from the thudding surf. There was only one such he’d found, where streams of meltwater fell from the heights and filled a wide pool, whose overflow went out a channel to the sea; at high tide the sea came in with enough draft for a boat. He visited there every day to learn if the Saints had found it, seeing in his mind as he went the boat tied up there and its sail furled—only to find it, once again, not there.

Meanwhile the long days were growing shorter. The Terns were stuffing themselves and their now-fledged young with quantities of food that Dar Oakley wouldn’t have thought would fit inside them. It was clear they were readying themselves for the long reach over open sea. If they went, he must go too. He couldn’t stay here; there was no here, not for him. And yet how could he go with the Terns? How, despite all their goodwill? Watching them dash and flit, training up their young in their trade, Dar Oakley thought a thought no Crow has likely ever thought before or since: that if only he could, he would become a being of another species; that there was a species better than his own to wish to be.

But they weren’t going to leave him there anyway. When that ever-returning need to go passed over all the red-billed birds, then the ones who knew him best (at least it might be those ones, he really couldn’t tell) flew around him, swooping in and dashing away as though they could draw him up after them, as People’s whipped Horses draw a cart into motion. His stomach was full and his plumage sleek with fish fat; his head was crammed with their instructions and urgings and scoldings about how he should hold himself and his wings, rise on the rising air until he reached a stream of wind that would carry him almost without his needing to make any effort. If he was let down again he must find another rising wind, and be lifted up to join it again. It was all so simple.

The air was filled with summonses. Fat white clouds striped with long thin ones walked the far sky, and surely the apprehension he felt was only the impossible journey ahead? But no, it was something else, something he went toward that at the same time, but faster, came toward him.

He rose. What a story to tell other Crows, if he ever again met any.

I don’t know, no one now can know, if the boat of the Saints and its cohort reached the continent across the western sea; if it returned to where it started, or if it only went on sailing, and still sails, ever deeper into Ymr.

But of course one or another of them must have returned, or the story wouldn’t have gone on being told, and it has been; it was still being told five hundred years on, when it was first written down: the story of a voyage undertaken in a hide boat by Saints.

But suppose it wasn’t one of the Saints who returned, or one of the fisher People; suppose it was the kitchen-boy, who knew how to rig a sail, who had named himself Branan, Little Bran. Alone and near dead, in the dismasted and oarless boat, after being blown clinging to the wonderful tiller for who knows how long by the prevailing westerlies, back to the islands of before.

He feels a change in the sea; a smell awakens him. He struggles to rise from where he lies in the bottom of the boat and sees a shore, like the shore he once knew. A rising tide carries the little craft over the bar and into the cove. There it bobs for a time until fisher People catch sight of it and put out to see what it might be. They hail it—from afar, being suspicious folk. The kitchen-boy calls to them as best he can: Is this the island of the Gray Abbey and the Brothers in white?

Yes, they answer. And who are you?

I am he who set out with the Saints for the Isles of the Blessed, and how many centuries have passed since then?

No centuries, they’d tell him, a few years only, three or five, no more.

I’m afraid to come ashore, he’d call. When I touch earth, I will fall and crumble into grave-dust, as one dead for a hundred years.

Don’t be a fool, they shout to him. Come ashore with us, and tell us what became of you, and of the Saints.

And he’d come, and not crumble into grave-dust when his foot touched the shore.

He could have lived long there too, and perhaps become a Brother in the Abbey in whose kitchen he had served, telling and retelling his tale, which would go on being retold (and changed, and added to) after he was dead.

And it would be told how after they sailed west from the last island of the known world, the eight of them came upon a Mermaid in the middle of the sea, and watched her white breast rise and fall softly in sleep. How after that they reached the fiery Island of the Smiths, and heard the beings there cry, Woe! Woe! as they in the boat came near. Black hairy men came to the shore and shook fists at them, and one brought a burning mass of Hell-stuff in a tongs and flung it at them, but by God’s grace it fell short, and made a great steam and noise in the sea.

Then how the twelve of them came to a crystal mountain in the sea. It was as cold as the black mountain was hot, and Brother Bran said it was a way up to heaven, just as the other was an outcrop of Hell. They found crystal Mass-vessels floating in the water there, and gathered them up, but soon they all melted away as though they had not been.

It would be told how the twenty companions once pitched their camp on the back of a great Whale, thinking it was an island, and even lit a fire there, which caused the Whale to sink down into the sea, and them with it, which nearly drowned them all!

And the Paradise of the Birds, in the farthest North, where uncountable numbers of white birds sang more sweetly than the Swans of Llyr, and had human faces: they were souls neither damned nor saved, awaiting Judgment Day.

And the Fortunate Isles, where sin had never been, and maidens in silver raiment brought them golden apples out of Eden to eat and sustain them in their voyage. There Bridget the female Saint remained and perhaps still remains.

The thirty of them then crossed a sea turbid and thick as stew, and passed through a fog into another sea transparent as air and still as glass, and they could look a league or more downward within to see fabulous creatures swimming. Beyond that they came to the Land they sought; but what land it was, whether time passed there or didn’t, if there were food and drink there or birds and beasts, and of what kind; if fresh springs there washed away memories of home; if there were swords and battles, or only prayer and praising God, the kitchen-boy couldn’t say, because before he could disembark he heard a Voice calling from shore, saying he was forbidden to enter that land until his life was ended. And after a long wait alone as the sun rose and set, the Boy Bran, Branan, turned the boat toward the rising sun and home.

If anything like that happened, if such stories as those were remembered and added to over many years, it could be that the name that the kitchen-boy had chosen for himself later got conflated with the name of great Brendan, Saint and sailor, who lived (I’d guess) a hundred years on. And so when now we read of the events in the account of Brendan’s miraculous Navigatio, first written down centuries after that and circulated through Christendom in many copies, maybe we can glimpse the little currach of the three Saints far out on the deep sea.

In none of those tales is there any mention of a Crow carried on the boat’s prow or the yardarm over empty sea, lifting his wings now and then for balance, turning his head this way and that toward the unchanging West; and his account—how he, at least, did cross the River Ocean to the other side—was never part of the tales.

He kept up with the migrating Terns well for a time, whether buoyed by their training and their knowledge or just by his own hope—well, he tried not to think about that, and now and then when he let himself look down at the dark or shining sea far below, he’d feel the heart within him faint.

Then Terns became fewer; he was alone. Which meant nothing in a practical way; either he could keep himself aloft and bent to the West or he couldn’t. When his eyes were open, he saw only sea and sky; also when they closed. He began to sleep on the wing, something he hadn’t thought was possible for him, though the Terns said they did it, oh many seabirds do, they do.

After a length of nights and days—how many he doesn’t know—there came a change in the air, something vast moving over the sea: it was that fearsome thing that from the shore of the land of ice he had perceived lying in the distance and the future. And the first sign of it was that he saw the Terns returning. A daywise wind seemed to be bowling them along, one then two then three, going back the way they had come. Too far off to make any sign to him, so light they couldn’t resist the wind’s pressing. Through the day the thing grew stronger; the air became thick and warm, the wind greater. His flying was no longer flying; he was a captive thing, plucked up and swept along faster than his wings could beat; he’d been seized on the fly as by an Eagle, and carried off. The Terns were all gone, he couldn’t see any; he couldn’t see anything at all.

“I thought they’d deserted me,” Dar Oakley told me. “That they knew something they couldn’t tell me, to flee somehow. What became of them, where they went, I don’t know. After a time the wind suddenly ceased, as though a big running beast had died, and I was alone in air like no air I’ve ever been in. Heavy air, you can sense it, air too heavy to breathe. I flew and flew and seemed not to move at all, as though a circling wind that I couldn’t feel turned and turned me in the same place. But always I knew I was moving, moving far fast. The whole dead air I hung in was moving one way. Once I saw a sea-being near me, one with many snaky arms, dead, flying like the demons who hunted that Brother, and turning as I turned. Then somehow it fell away. But if I was flying and he wasn’t, how could he have stayed by me?”

At that he looked up and around my house, as though some answer lay in the vicinity; it’s a way Crows think, as a human might rub his chin. Then he said, “It was strange to me, it was nowhere I’d have thought could be, I was blind and deaf sometimes, I flew upside down in rain, this beast went by. But whatever it was, wherever I was, I knew this: I was not in Ymr. The air in my throat and the sense of my eyes told me so. And if I was in this world and not in that, I was going to die.”

Why if it wasn’t Ymr?

“In those lands of Ymr,” he said, “nothing is mortal. They say it’s where the dead are, but really the ones there aren’t dead and never die. I wasn’t there but here. And so I knew I would die, and really die.”

I’ve tried to understand where he was, and I think that this is what happened: the Terns, and Dar Oakley following on, encountered a massive circular storm, an autumn hurricane or a nor’easter, moving up our coast in a great turning spiral. It may be that the Terns were caught in one spinning arm of it and were thrown outward, past Dar Oakley coming in, and they went on, pushed like leaves by the forward edge of the wind till they escaped, or didn’t. But Dar Oakley was drawn somehow deeper in, into the eye, where the rising air from the sea below kept him aloft. He felt the barometric pressure drop oppressively—I’ve learned that many birds can sense it. And there he was stuck, with other matter drawn up, lightning, salt rain falling upward. When at last he was flung out or fell out, battered nearly to death, he was far from the sea; he looked down, and through wild rainy air, he saw land.

The Land Promised to the Saints. It must be, for never in that tumult had he lost his sense of the four ways, and no matter how often he’d been turned around, he knew he’d been moving west with the storm. He was now on the sea’s far side, where the Brother said there was no death.

No death for Saints.

He fell more than flew to ground, unable to wing any longer, his plumage soaked through, starving and ragged, down through gesturing trees greater and more numerous than any trees he’d ever seen in Ka. He was sure he’d collide with a branch of one of these trees, so close-grown he would never pass safely through. Somehow he did pass unstuck, but also unable to catch hold of any branch and cling on.

He lay on earth. The leaves of the trees were impossible colors, orange and gold and red, torn and flung up by the wind like little brilliant birds. He can’t know how long he lay—he hardly knew he was there in life. He couldn’t escape if predators came near. Were there Foxes in paradise?

He looked upward.

On a low branch of a tree of red and orange leaves, a bird sat regarding him. A black bird: a Crow. He knew it for certain, even though this Crow was unlike the Crows where he had been born or the hooded Crows of the islands. It was large, deep glossy black, and heavy-billed. A Raven? No, not. He knew it for a Crow. The last thing he knew.

“Kits,” he said. Not a call, only a name. Then he died.