Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

The crows assert that a single crow could destroy heaven. Certainly this is so—but it proves nothing against heaven: for the definition of heaven is simply the absence of crows. —Franz Kafka

They could say such things because by then Crows had learned the trick of thinking that the world could be different from the way it is, and therefore to wish it was.

What were they doing? It was apparent that the new ones had come to take the others’ freehold, and the ones in possession were fighting them off just the way a Crow family would fight off invaders, crying at them and threatening and even tangling with them, the invaders doing the same. But it wasn’t like Crows at all. The defenders fought against the others as against interlopers, but they killed them like prey.

It appeared to them that People loved death: they cherished dead People bodies, and strove to make more of them, to handle or to harm.

“There is a bond, a binding,” the Singer said, closing his eyes, “between the dead and those yet unborn, which the living must keep.”

Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.

Whatever band or tribe or nation of People is yours, some number among you have to do work that protects the others from threats they can’t see; that ensures their safety as they pass from life into death; that earns the favor of beings who can change the weather and raise the winds, stop the sun in the sky to light a path. At

One Crow alone is no Crows:

Dar Oakley could see his jaw wagging. It had always cost the man: talking and not listening.

and any Crow is every Crow.

People can have many names, or they could then: they shed one and gain another, or they have a name in one place and a different name elsewhere; a name they give and a name they keep. Dar Oakley’s name for One Ear was Hider; his name for Dar Oakley was Seeker.

‘Old Turtle lives at the bottom of the Beautiful Lake of the North. He is the oldest being there is, and therefore the wisest. Also his ancestor was the being on whose back the world was made.

Crows may be many, Crows may be few, but one Crow alone is no Crows, that’s the truth.

was unwelcome in the city, and if he was

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

that here you can never go back the way you came. That you never do anywhere. You only and always go on.