Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruin of Ymr

by John Crowley

But you see, right there: in every human language we talk about ways and paths and bringing and bearing things along them. We come to a fork in the road, a parting of the ways, we take a wrong turn. Crows never talk in that way. But if I couldn’t, I’m not sure I could tell a story, or recount a life. We are beings on the path, always wondering what’s beyond the next turning. Crows live in a wide, trackless space of three dimensions. If I

Strange how the knowledge of a name gives possession of a thing. When he learned spear and carriage and pot and cow from her, those things separated from the mass of things seen and became at once themselves and his.

“A fire,” Fox Cap said, and went ahead faster. Fires made places amid placelessness for People, Dar Oakley thought, a way of having a dwelling-place wherever they went.

never actually written) testament. I still have it. In here. Isn’t that strange? Maybe it isn’t strange at all. She was sure that death closed her life like a book; she didn’t think that the physical books she gave to carefully considered recipients would cause her to live on in their possession or reading of them. And yet to her the continuation of her stuff was her continuation. Of course it was: her other world was this world. I couldn’t say to her that she seemed to be distributing the parts of herself through the world so that like Osiris she could someday be reconstituted. She’d have laughed at that. She was simply tidying up, with just time enough to do the job until the last list was handed off to me. For the ultimate continuation of her is me.

In paradisum deducat te angeli.

Long ago Fox Cap had told him: in Ymr is a thing of every kind there can be, but only one of each. In this place, though, Dar Oakley saw only one kind of thing, endlessly repeated.

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.

The years when Dar Oakley lived among the city Crows in ignorance of his own history were also the years when the great arrangements of time, space, thought, and activity that he calls Ymr (where what People believe to be so is so, where they live enclosed in their own inventions) began ever more rapidly to fall apart: as though thought alone had kept them in working order, and thought was failing. Over centuries People—some People—had become more and more sure they could do anything, make anything, change anything: and so they could. They had even—too late to stop—changed the earth and the seas and the seasons: changed Time. People knew it and knew that it was their fault, even if they were among the ones who could do nothing about it.

I am afraid: not afraid of death, but of darkness and solitude, and I always have been: as afraid as any Crow. It’s why I have asked Dar Oakley to guide me at the last to that place, for which I now have at least his tales for evidence.

A couple of poor beasts born to die, Dar Oakley thought. Who got into tangles they never expected. Trying to help People, or save themselves. He realized—it struck him for the first time now as a possibility—that there might be many like the Coyote and the Crow, all around Kits’s wide round world. Maybe one of every sort of beast and bird—one each, caught in People stories and People hopes, foolishly wise, journeying in realms not theirs, seeking or stumbling upon or finding and losing the Most Precious Thing: stealing it for themselves, hiding it and losing it, forgetting where it was. The thing that kills the thing that kills us all: Death. Coyote’s gift, the thing People have hated and feared the most and yet can never do without. Dar Oakley began to

Stories, Coyote said. Not to tell you something you don’t already know. We’re made of stories now, brother. It’s why we never die even if we do.

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.

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

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

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

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