Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr, Page 33

  One lifts her head. “Thunder?”

  “Not now,” Dar Oakley says. “Wrong season.” But now he can hear it too: a long rolling rumble, rising and falling, over daywise from them. Unlike thunder, it doesn’t cease and start again; it’s continuous.

  “Weird,” says the Crow, whose name (Dar Oakley thinks) is Toebone.

  They return to foraging, each lifting his head now and then to listen, and to smell the air.

  “Smoke,” says Toebone.

  It is. Not the smell of wood-fire, though; they know that smell.

  “Look,” says another Crow. Overhead a crowd of Blackbirds, flying in a confused mass daywise to darkwise, as though tossed by storm winds, though there are none.

  “Let’s go see,” Dar Oakley says. “It’s beyond that ridge, I bet. Whatever it is.”

  “You go see,” Toebone says, and the others agree. “Come back and tell us.”

  As always.

  The earth’s obscure beneath Dar Oakley as he flies, mist, low light. He’s high enough that he can look down on the road that passes through the lowlands. Along the road a mass is moving that soon proves to be People, lots of them, all going one way, all taking their steps together, so many that as he descends he can hear the striking of their boots on the road. The sound Toebone heard grows consistently louder as he approaches it, which thunder wouldn’t do, and the smell of smoke carried on the damp breeze is stronger too, and familiar now.

  Winging and gliding, Dar Oakley reaches a winter-leafless tree well ahead of those People, and from there watches them pass by below him. Around them, leading, following, on either side, are others on Horses. Then more Horses and Mules pulling carts, whipped along. All of them moving as fast as so many can.

  How can this be told about? He’d tell the other Crows: Think of all the wagons and all the Horses and the People riding on them on all the days you’ve ever seen them, and put them all together on one and the same day, all walking daywise. But of course they wouldn’t be able to think of any such thing as that; he can hardly think it himself even with all of them passing beneath him where he sits. Each of them carries on his shoulder what is unmistakably a gun. The bitter smell in the air is gun smoke.

  Crows are afraid of very little, though they are wary of a lot of things. One thing that does frighten them, that they can never get used to, is a sudden, sharp, loud noise. Not long before, a new species of People engine had appeared in Dar Oakley’s lands: a string of great carts pulled at headlong speed without Horses or Oxen on special roads that nothing else uses—alarming at first to Crows for its long, piercing cries and the dense smoke it produced, a People fire on the move. But its noise begins faint and far away and only grows loud as it comes closer, like thunder. Harmless. They stayed away from it for a long time though, just in case.

  They know about guns, too, by now: they’ve had guns fired at them, and now and then a Crow will be killed by one. Not often; Crows learn young to distinguish a man carrying a gun from a man carrying a shovel or an ax, and just how far to stay away from a gun to be safe. Still, the nearby bang of one can make Crows take to the air even in the midst of a conversation—they just can’t help it. A whiff of gun smoke can also be good, though: it can mean that nearby something’s been killed.

  Dar Oakley knows where this road runs, and sees a faster way to get to where it’ll come out beyond the far ridge. That’s where a cloud of yellow fog he can see now has settled: but it’s not a cloud, and it’s rising. The noise has resolved itself into individual thumps and bangs. The smell is huge.

  Along the crest of the low ridge is a row of trees where Dar Oakley alights to look down on what is taking place in the meadows and brown fields beyond.

  A crowd of People larger than any he’s ever seen, far larger than the line of them he’d watched moving all together on the road. They are facing another group just as large not far off. Lines of wagonlike things, each bearing what looks like a fire-blackened log; they belch smoke like a gun, but much more, and then a huge gun-noise reaches Dar Oakley. At first he thinks it’s simply the noise that knocks down the ones moving toward the wagon-thing, but no: the black log is a hollow gun, from which a ball as big as a People head is flung. The wagon and gun leap in a spasm to eject it.

  The line of People he first saw is now reaching the field; they have banners and drums, the ones riding Horses are waving weapons and urging the rest into a run, and then a black ball is thrown into their midst too and immediately more than one of the People falls, and also one of the shouting ones on a Horse, Horse screaming, People blown into parts.

  There’s no describing this. Not even he could make Crows see this by his tale-telling. He’ll have to return and say, Follow me.

  “What is it?” they cry. “What? Why?” The Crows that Dar Oakley has brought to the ridgeline row of trees can see how many People and Horses have fallen down, can see the balls fly into the lines of advancing People and strike down several at once. Some balls fall short or long and drive into earth, or they land and bounce high—Crows fly up in alarm as they see that—and still do damage to People too crowded together to avoid them. The Crows look this way and that, fly off and return, baffled by the questions that only People can answer, if even they can: Why can’t they, with all their awful noise, just drive the others away? Why do they kill what they can’t eat, or won’t eat? What are they doing, Dar Oakley?

  Dar Oakley just then experiences a new memory, a thing not remembered since it first happened: sitting in an Oak in a thunderstorm with a rain-wet Raven, who gave him a word for an inexplicable People thing that he, Dar Oakley, had seen. It’s a Battle, the Raven said.

  “It’s a Battle,” Dar Oakley says.

  They stay in trees far from it, examining with Crow-sight the details. They are Crows of peaceable times; they’ve seen fights but not murders among People, and down there are more People dead than they have ever seen in any one place alive.

  The short winter day is ending. Before the light is gone, it seems that one of the two masses of People is drawing away from the other. A roar like the roar of a train begins and rises among the opposing mass, who begin to move, the ones on Horses directing them by waving their swords and hats and crying out.

  “Those,” Dar Oakley says, “are the winners. The others the losers.” The Crows ponder the words.

  It seems that the winners will pursue the losers up the wooded slope and kill more, but after a time they cease, and turn back. Night thickens; the Crows retreat to farther trees, deep evergreens where they feel safe. Through the dark hours one or another will wake, startled by far-off cries and screams, animal and People. Many dull fires can be seen; the crackle of guns from nearby or farther off.

  By dawn there are no more cries. The mass of those who fought have moved away. The fires gutter out. The dead remain, and they lie out on that field for days; the Crows return each dawn to find the wealth still there. It’s unsettling, so much of it, so violently produced; they take their time to approach it. Easiest to get at are the bodies smashed apart by the flying balls. Dar Oakley takes his turn as a Bigger to watch over the field (but watch for what?). The hum of flies is loud; soon enough these bodies will be white with maggots.

  The Biggers call warnings: There are living People going among the dead, opening their clothes and digging in their pockets and taking away paper or other things—the Crows see them take shiny things on chains from around some necks, and that interests them, but the People keep all these. For some of the dead they dig holes through the day and put one of the dead in each, and then hammer crossed sticks there to mark the spot, stand staring at it a time with hats in hands. The Crows avoid them and gather around the disemboweled Horses and the Mules that are waiting to be thrown on piles of burning logs.

  Through the next days, other People come onto the field bringing oxcarts, which they fill with their dead. The task seems hateful to them; they wrap their faces in cloth, and often turn away as though unable to keep doing it. Sometimes
an arm or a foot in its boot will drop away from a body as it is hoisted onto the cart, and the Crows will draw closer. By now Vultures, who hunt by smell as well as sight, circle high up, waiting their turn. Within days the feasting Crows have grown so used to the carts that they hardly look up even when one draws up near them, and once one of those who’ve come to collect the bodies cries out in rage or loathing and takes out a small gun and shoots at them. The Crows fly up, scolding, and go on to the next nearest. The masked People lift up the Crow-picked body.

  “What will they do with them all?” asks the Crow Toebone.

  “Wait and see,” Dar Oakley says, as though he knows.

  What they do is to carry them a ways away, not far, to where other carts are coming with more dead, and where other People (mostly the darker-colored kind common in these regions, Dar Oakley sees) are digging a wide, shallow cut in the earth. The wagons stop; the dead are carried out, stiffened in death or flopping will-lessly, and each is wrapped in a coarse sheet and placed crosswise in the trench. Pretty soon there are no more sheets and the dead are put in without them, their heads without eyes (that’s the Crows’ doing) turned to the sky. As they are laid down, other People move along the trench, shoveling back in the dirt that they dug out. Other diggers lengthen the cut to accommodate more. Crows look down on wrapped bodies covered with dirt, then more not dirt-covered; then not wrapped but bare, then empty trench awaiting more, and the diggers continuing. One of these diggers can be seen to faint, or die, falling down for no reason. When night comes and Crows depart, the work goes on by the light of torches.

  It’s all right with Crows. Even when these buried ones are subtracted from all the dead of the Battle, still those who lie out ungathered and uncovered, and those whom a few shovels of earth can’t shelter from Crows and others, those who are left behind when the living People give up the work and march away—they are more than the whole nation of Crows and all other eaters of the dead can ever finish. Dar Oakley, surveying what the People have made of the Future, how they’ve slung Death over a whole valley floor for others to live on, not for a day but a whole season, thinks of saying to the Crows, This is good. This is what they should do. And I knew that they would. He’d like to say it, but it’s not true, and he can’t.

  When they returned to their summer demesne up billwise, the Crows told and retold what all of them already knew: what they had seen, how much they’d eaten, how fat they got, the wonder of it, like nothing ever seen before, People flesh, Horse flesh, dead Dogs even that the People shot when the Dogs tried to get in on the wealth. The few Crows who had wintered nearer home also listened, annoyed at the stories finally, Yes, yes, we heard you, flesh too plentiful to eat; and they vowed to go farther this winter and see what there was to see, get what there was to get.

  “It can’t be they’d ever do such a thing again, though,” one said to Dar Oakley. (She was a Cherry, and thus a descendant of his own, though she didn’t know that.) “Would they?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” Dar Oakley said. “You never know, about People. You can never come to the end of what they’ll do, or stop doing.”

  And when the cold weather came and again Crows went down that way, it was the same. By then the Crows of that land, Na Cherry’s old flock and its neighbors, had also discovered the riches; through the spring and summer they’d learned to keep an eye out for ranks of People all moving together to where the killing would be done. Beat of boots on the earth. The local Crows would keep a distance but never lose sight of them. Now and then one of the dark hats would turn and a white face look up at them in fear or hatred.

  Death-birds.

  The great encampments like the one the Crows first saw, the gray tents and the massed People all dressed alike, the campfires multiplying to the distance and the mounted fighters rushing here and there—they became less common. Fewer of the great black guns that threw the balls, and more men on Horses fighting others on Horses, the clashes short and furious. There were barns burned by night and People hanged from trees and cattle shot dead and cut up for the fighters to eat and the remainder left to rot. This sort of fighting Dar Oakley recognized. He had seen the like, in other places and times; had seen victors cut away the ears and other parts of the defeated to keep or to wear, as these did; had seen them bury their own fighters but leave their enemies to rot and to Crows, as vengeance, so that they might never rest in death. Yet sometimes now they must abandon their own dead too where they lay, both Horses and People, and ride on. It was all normal, long-standing; Dar Oakley forbore even to explain it to the others.

  One thing that was new was the single fighter who with a long gun climbs into a tree and waits there hidden, watching. When a number of fighters from the other side come near and dismount to look around through their black tubes or study papers or rest, the shooter in the tree lifts the gun with slow care, aims, and fires. One of the group falls; the rest then drop down too to hide, not knowing just where the shot came from; when they can, they creep fast away. Most often the dead one is left behind. Crows learn to watch and wait for this, calling others—come here, look in that tree crotch, there—which obviously angers the one in the tree. The hubbub will draw the eyes of his prey to him. Get! Get! he whispers at them fiercely, yet staying as still as any Owl.

  The Crows don’t care. There was always further wealth to be found, that was the main thing, no end to it: obscured in the woods and in the long grass, muddied in the drying creek beds, having lain there while Crows ate elsewhere. To find it Crows just followed the Pigs of the farms, who nosed it out from the undergrowth and rooted in the rotting cloth. The local Crows could afford to be generous, invited Dar Oakley and the transients to begin, Have at it, you’re welcome, no, no, you first. When two Crows out of lifelong habit started to squabble over some piece of cadaver, the others laughed until the squabblers recollected where they were and what they had. And where there is Plenty there is Peace. At evening they all gathered, laughing, heads shiny with fat, reeking of the rich smell of death. A dozen new names were earned for feats of gluttony never known before. The farmer-People of that region would never forget their exulting.

  Unlike migrating Blackbirds or Swallows, the Crows went home in slow stages, small bands, foraging and resting or ranging wide as they went. Often a Crow would find herself alone, out of range of Crow calls she knew. Dar Oakley was alone when he first sensed the ones who accompanied the flock, moving over the ground below, going the way the Crows went. It wasn’t any noise they made that drew his attention, or that they appeared along open People roads—they could actually be seen anywhere, and were silent. It took Dar Oakley a time of watching for them, or seeking their presence, to understand who they were: People fighters.

  “Are they following us?” he asked another of his clan, who happened to be by. “Are they going where we’re going?”

  “Who?” said the other, lifting her wings and looking around for a threat. “Where?”

  Dar Oakley tried to locate one to show her but somehow couldn’t, though a moment earlier several had certainly been there, passing through the thin Aspens over the fallen leaves. The other Crow gave him a doubtful look and went on.

  He couldn’t really see them: he just knew they were there. As he had known the clans of the elder People who long before had walked darkwise following One Ear. The harder he looked, the less he saw them, and the more of them he knew were there. Whether they were all the dead fighters, or only the dead that the Crows had tasted; if they followed to claim something from the Crows, or to revenge themselves on them, Dar Oakley didn’t know. He didn’t know if they bore the wounds they had taken, he didn’t know if they went in the clothes they’d worn or without any. What do you see? the Crows asked Dar Oakley, watching him twitch and start. But he couldn’t say.

  They were unlike One Ear’s West-wandering dead in one way: One Ear’s had grown more numerous the farther they moved, as Death moved before them and made more, who rose from where they lay to join them. Thes
e ones, though, grew steadily fewer. Why? Dar Oakley began to perceive how by ones and twos and threes they’d leave the crowd, turn away daywise or darkwise toward the People towns and farms that appeared now and then. And at length he understood. These fighters had lived in those places, had left them to go to fight in Battles, and now were heading home, as the Crows, too, were heading home.

  By the time he began to recognize the billwise country again, there seemed to be only a few around or below him. He wondered if some had just grown tired of journeying, as some among One Ear’s People had, and stopped for good in the woods or hills. It was hard to track them, in any case; they were as much not there as there, shadows that nothing cast. Finally he sensed only two remaining: they seemed related, though he couldn’t say why. Without really choosing to, he began to keep close to them—following them as they’d followed him. They’d come and go as though lost, then be near him again and walking purposefully. Dar Oakley knew that following them he’d drifted far from the way to his old demesne, but he didn’t mind. Spring was a hard time for a single Crow like himself to be among friends and kin: maybe just as well to wander, learn something new.

  There: the two of them, sitting motionless together in a clearing, a small fire between them. Of course there was no fire, only the thought of one. Or perhaps a memory: two People at a fire. His memory, or theirs?

  Apple trees were white with blossom, fields turned brown by the plow, when the two in plain day came to a stream beneath trailing willows. Across the stream on higher ground was a small plot set apart by a low fence and a gate. A few upright stones marked the People remains laid beneath. The two seemed to strive to cross the stream and reach that place, but they couldn’t. They couldn’t go any farther. Dar Oakley knew this, but they didn’t know it.

  Crows—those that chose to take notice of such things—knew by then something about graves and graveyards; they knew that the long boxes put into holes dug deep in the earth contained each a People body, child or old one, the size of the box would tell you, though you saw nothing of that body and never would. The two blue-clad fighters longed for that dwelling-place. He knew they longed, but not why; he knew that even those who were buried in these places set aside for them couldn’t remain there, though some People believed they could and did. Fox Cap long ago had brought home the bones of her People from where they were scattered, and placed them in the cairns that had been made for them; but she had told Dar Oakley that those dead were by then in another Realm the living couldn’t reach. (She had reached it, though, and he too with her.) The only happy dead, she said, are those who know where their bones are laid: only they are free to go and never return.