Ka

CHAPTER TWO

The Crows have no dead.

It’s not that they live forever, never die, though Ymr has at various times believed that of them. Nor is it that they care nothing for those who die, and don’t mourn: they do. Mothers who have lost nestlings, mates who have lost their fellows—they can be driven to distraction by it. They hate death; a dead Crow discovered can occasion hours of loud keening by a big congregation, and the place is avoided for long after. Leave even a scrap of black plastic in a field and Crows will come and cry out on it in alarm and horror, keeping a distance, until they dare come see it’s nothing.

No, they know death, they mourn: but the dead aren’t alive to them; the dead are nowhere—in a nameless hollow in a heart, in memory or in story maybe, but no presences they can speak to, to comfort or be comforted by. No dead to love or fear. At least so it was then, and mostly still is.

For such beings it was hard to understand what People did. 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.

“Do you not honor your dead?” the Singer once asked Dar Oakley, but not as though he didn’t already know the answer well enough. “Those who went before you, to whom you owe everything, life, knowledge, speech, everything?”

“I don’t know anything about them,” Dar Oakley answered. “They’re dead.”

“From whom then did you learn to fly, what foods to eat, what dangers to avoid?”

“From myself,” Dar Oakley said. “My mother, too. Her Servitor. Others.”

“And who taught them?”

Dar Oakley didn’t respond.

“There is a bond, a binding,” the Singer said, closing his eyes, “between the dead and those yet unborn, which the living must keep.” He reached out as though to take the hands of others, those on this side, those on that, himself between. And Dar Oakley felt beside him his own mother and his father, whose anxious heads he could remember looking down at him when he lay hidden on the forest floor; and behind them the mothers and fathers who had taught them, and behind them, others, forever. All dead but the living.

When had Crows begun? Not with himself, for he had parents; but so had they, and their parents too had parents, and there could have been no beginning, because each Crow had been hatched from an egg laid by another, and there could be no first of either.

“Crow is unborn,” the Singer said. “Crow never dies.”

“Crows die,” Dar Oakley said. “We do.”

“Crows die,” the Singer said. “Crow never dies. When Crow dies, Death will die too.”

Dar Oakley and the Singer sat on the high ledge above the grassland, from where Dar Oakley had by that time witnessed several battles. The Singer could not climb so far; a strong one had carried him up on his back, and would return when the sun was low to carry him down again. Below and far, the People (as Dar Oakley had by then learned to call them) herded their animals over that ground to graze. Dar Oakley could see a whitened People rib cage, like the claws of a great beast reaching out from under the earth.

“When you win a battle,” he said, “and kill those others, why do you all go around the field, and cut and stab and abuse them?”

“To take revenge on them for the hurts and humiliations their kind visited on our ancestors.”

“And the ones whose heads you keep?” Dar Oakley asked. “The same?”

“No,” said the Singer. “They were great fighters. We honor them in that way, and in our possession they grant us some of their strength.”

“They’re dead,” Dar Oakley said. “Dead as dead.”

“You’ve learned to speak our words, Crow,” the Singer said, smiling. “But you remain outside them still.”

How it was that Dar Oakley learned to speak to one of the People in this way, to argue with him and listen, is part of the story of how he came into Ymr; and it begins with the time Dar Oakley saw a Fox.

It was once again summer, toward evening. He was on far watch for his family, and at the glimpse of russet he was about to call a warning, but even as he bent forward with open bill, something made him pause.

A Fox? He had glimpsed its red head and black nose, certain of that, there around those Hawthorns he had seen it—but how would a Fox get high up in a bush? He’d never seen one climb and didn’t know if they could.

There it was again, that warning russet, there and gone again. Not coming closer, certainly. Dar Oakley moved to a better perch to see, and then to another. Where was it, that Fox? He gave a warning call, unable not to, but almost too small to be heard. And as though summoned, the Fox stood up, not far off, and looked his way. Stood up, like the two-legs. It was a two-legs, with a head like a Fox’s, a Fox’s ears and snout, but its own eyes, green below its empty Fox eyes. It was a two-legs with the head or pelt of a Fox put on top of its own head, with the Fox’s back fur and brush dangling down behind. In its hand the two-legs held a hunting stick, with a fang-sharp point.

For a long moment the two-legs studied Dar Oakley, and in that green-eyed gaze Dar Oakley felt a feeling new to him. Except by other Crows, or by a scanning Hawk or hunting Weasel for reasons of their own, Dar Oakley had never been looked at steadily for his own sake. He was caused to feel conscious of his own self there on this branch at this moment, as though he were both the looker and the seen. It was uncomfortable, like an itch beneath his head feathers.

The two-legs raised its stick and pointed, in that way they had: like a bird raising hackles, a Grouse inflating its breast, or a Boar pawing earth. It said, I am here and I defy you. It seemed Dar Oakley was to respond in some way—fly away, come closer, call friends. The two-legs dagged the air, eyes not leaving him. Annoyed and goaded, he broke off a dead twig from the branch where he sat, and getting it firmly in his mouth and pointed right, he becked, aiming his own stick at the two-legs, and then again. There, take that.

The being—it was a small one, perhaps young—did something remarkable then. It opened wide its mouth and called. It made a sound that resembled a Crow’s call, though not so closely that any Crow would mistake it. Ka-ka-ka-ka, it said in a rapid trill. Dar Oakley could see its blunt white teeth. It raised its own stick again, and it was clear now what was wanted—Dar Oakley pointed back with his. Again the two-legs made that Crow-like call, but smaller, and after trying the same trick again it went away, losing interest maybe. Dar Oakley let it go, and shook the stick from his mouth; but then before the two-legs was gone from sight, he flew to a higher perch to watch.

Was it hunting? It seemed to move in no definite way, ambling here and there, suddenly ducking down as though to stalk prey, or maybe sensing something that followed it, though Dar Oakley up above could see there was nothing near. He counseled himself to forget about it, go eat, see where his family had got to (he could hear Younger Sister far away call, and no one answer). He kept watch on the being, unseen by it. But dark was coming. The two-legs seemed to feel that too; Dar Oakley watched its restless head turn this way and that (the sightless Fox head turning too) and its feet carry it first one way and then another, stop and pause. In this fashion the two of them went a long way into the forest, the birds and small animals falling silent as the two-legs went among them, kicking at the entangling growth, and no wonder, but Dar Oakley was puzzled how a being could hunt if every being knew of its coming.

Not hunting. What was this game? The being went faster, turned more often, making a wide circle within the forest, why?

Then Dar Oakley understood—though what caused the understanding he couldn’t have said.

The little two-legs was lost.

It sat down then with a sudden bump, as though just then knowing it was so: lost.

How curious. It wasn’t at all far from where its family or kind had settled; there was enough day left even to walk there, yet the two-legs didn’t know the way to go.

Dar was made to think of that time when he first got out of the nest and tumbled to the ground, a place he’d never been before (he’d been no places before), and how Father and the Servitor had yelled at him to get up and fly, and his mother from a branch above had called to him to stay still and not move, her eye looking everywhere at once. And like the two-legs he’d sat, and not moved.

Well, then.

He called sharply to it, get up, go on. It looked up at him—understanding now that Dar Oakley had been following—and raised the stick, in welcome or gladness. Now how could Dar Oakley know that? But he was sure of it. He dropped from the branch and flew in the direction the young one should go, stopped and looked back. The two-legs still stood, but then, in the same sudden way that Dar Oakley had understood the being was lost, it understood that it was to follow the Crow. Come on, come on, Dar Oakley called, and the strange being, what could it be thinking, fell into a low crouch and began to move through the brush and over the fallen logs in the direction Dar Oakley had shown it, raising its head now and then to look around just like the Fox whose head and tail it bore! And it was Dar Oakley’s turn to laugh, for from where he sat above, it really did look for an instant like a prowling Fox.

In this way they went toward the thinning of the forest. The two-legs got tired of the Fox game and stood on its long legs. Dar Oakley never got very close to it—the young one seemed too lost and confused to be harmful, but Dar Oakley was no fool, and knew that trick.

Clouds smeared the sun darkwise. It seemed important that the little one reach its roost before night. He flew on, not straight but in long waves over the moorland, so that the two-legs child (he was sure now that it was a child) would see where he went. High up in an Oak he went—here he had rested on the day he had gone looking for a place where no Crows were, and almost got eaten. The child knew the way now, and was running as fast as its legs could go. It turned back once, though, and with its stick and a call seemed to summon Dar Oakley to come along.

So he did, flying on ahead again, then alighting and waiting for the two-legs to catch up. For the first time he thought how tedious it must be not to have wings. When they came in sight of the palisades of the settlement, he could see an older one standing there, one of those he had decided (without really knowing why) were females; when she at last caught sight of the young one in the tall grass, she came running to catch it up with cries, pull off the Fox’s skin from its head to tug at its hair, press her face to the young one’s face. The young one squirmed away, and pointed at Dar Oakley, though the older one wouldn’t look his way, only pulled at the young one to follow; and they went in through the gap in the palisade where the two fighters’ heads still stared down.

Dar Oakley mounted to the top of the palisade, found footing, and looked down into the settlement. The young one, seeing him there, called a greeting, and Dar Oakley, spoken to he was sure, answered with a call: Here I am. He would think, long after, that this was the first time he had spoken in answer to one of the People. He wanted more. It was late in the day, he was hungry, but he was more curious than hungry.

He flew to the twiggy, rushy top of one of their shelters, and looked down into their places and their lives, their fires and the things they used, themselves coming and going in and out. He wasn’t the only bird there: there were the ground-nesting birds they kept, and Sparrows around him in the rushes, a Linnet that had got stuck in an arrangement of sticks by the entrance of the dwelling and couldn’t get out, singing its song. None of the settlers paid Dar Oakley any attention, except the one he’d led here, in the Fox cap. Older ones also tried to take the cap when the little one squatted among them, but they couldn’t snatch it. Their mouths moved constantly, making that long, soft murmuring they all made when together.

What were they saying, if they were saying anything, and not making sounds just for sound’s sake? If he could get close enough, maybe he could tell. Sometimes one would throw back her head and make a louder noise, the ka-ka-ka-ka that the little one had made in the forest, and the other would take it up in response. Mostly it was the low sound, the cooing like a fledgling Crow’s inquiries, but not that, and not the throbbing of Doves, either, whatever Doves meant by that noise they made all day long.

You might think that Crows must understand the languages of other birds at least, but it’s not so. Crows understand no one easily except one another. Everyone understands alarm calls, cries of distress or threat, anyone’s—the meaning’s clear enough—and Crows, like Jays and others, can imitate those cries when it serves them. Crows can understand some of the high speech of Ravens, but some words they share have other meanings when Ravens use them. For that matter, Crows don’t always understand strange Crows who come from other flocks and other places; their speech is one mark of their strangeness. But of the speech of Doves or Sparrows or Geese—or Boars or Wolves, if such beings have language—Crows understand nothing. Crows who can say a few words in People speech are common now, but Dar Oakley believes no Crow has ever learned it well enough to talk freely with one of them.

No Crow but he.

He dared to come a bit closer, though never staying long on any perch. He watched them, observed their ever-moving hands manipulate things, take them up, put them down, alter them. All that they used, he understood, they had made themselves—what other being did that? Was it a burden, that they had to? It must be that they spoke, for when one uttered a string of sounds another would take some action, just as though the first had said something and been understood.

He bent his head toward the gathering of them. Ymr, he thought they said. Ymr, ymr. His ears heard his throat make sound, and the tongue in his mouth tried to shape it.

Ymr.

Much later he’d wonder: Had he heard the sound and learned it, or made the sound and taught it to himself? Was it theirs or his own? By then there was no way to know.

The young one with the Fox pelt caught sight of him then, and pointed at him and drew the others to look. Should he flee? She—for now he had decided or felt it to be a young female, maybe only because she sat close among the other females as no fur-faced male did—patted herself, then pointed at him, cooing and yakking, as the others also looked up at him; and he understood. She was telling them the story of how he had found her and led her here.

He called to them, trying somehow to vouch for her. The single loud sound, the universal call.

“Ka!” she cried back at him, and spread her thin arms like wings; and he knew she had meant to speak, to call him, make meaning to him.

“Ymr,” he said to her. It was hardly a sound at all, a strangled gurgle as though he had swallowed a Tree Frog. Yet she leapt up, exulting.

She had said his word, or tried to, and he had said hers. They knew they had spoken, and that was all. It was enough.

From then on she sought him where she thought he lived—that sun-shot and open region of the young forest where he’d first seen her—and moped when he couldn’t be found; he in turn spied on the settlement, annoyed at the crowds she always seemed to be within, young or old, as though she belonged to everyone. When they did find each other alone, they’d each say the word they’d learned, and then try another, both of them good at imitation, but they hardly knew what they said when they spoke it.

It became clear soon enough that she couldn’t speak his language in his way, and he couldn’t speak hers in her way: their mouths and tongues and throats weren’t made to do it. But word by word as summer went by they came to hear each other’s language, and to know what was meant by the words in it. So that was the way they went on: she spoke in her language, he in his, and back and forth they began to understand each other. There are so few words in his language—she said the speech of Ka, calling it after the sound she’d first made, the one she heard most often—and they are deployed so differently in different tones and circumstances, that she learned slowly; he in turn had to remember vast numbers of her words, all sounding the same to him, mostly used in just one way. Over time he came to use some words of hers in his speech, and she words of his in hers—the mystery words for which their own languages had no equivalents.

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. Other things took longer to grasp. He saw that she could call a call in the middle of a crowd of her kind and only one of them would turn to answer her. How? She had, she told Dar Oakley, called that one’s name.

“What name?” Dar Oakley asked.

“His own name,” she said. “The name that is his only.”

They were on the high rocks from where Dar Oakley had watched his first battle. They were rarely apart now, unless he was with Crows of his acquaintance who were fussed by her nearness, her fang-stick, and her cries; or if she was in her house as she called it with her kin, who did not like a Crow to be too close or too constant. “Death-bird,” she’d said, and then she fell on the ground headlong, eyes closed and motionless (death) then up and leaping with arms flapping (bird ) and pointed to Dar Oakley. It was his name, or the name of his kind.

Death. Bird. He thought of those naked fighters, summoning Dar Oakley’s flock to the field down there. Death-birds.

“But everything has two names,” she said. “The kind of thing it is, and its own name.” She pointed up toward the heights that rose behind them. “What do you call that? What is the name of it?”

“Mountain.”

“But its own name,” she said. “What is its own name?”

“Why would a mountain have a name? It can’t answer when you call it.”

She fell back laughing, her white stomach shaking; the little twist of skin in its middle. “You don’t know anything, Bird,” she said.

She had not one but many names all her own, some of them given to her and some that she had chosen herself; some meaningless to her except as calls; some the same as her mother’s or her father’s but with her own difference.

Her mother and her father had had their own names too, she told Dar Oakley, though they were both dead. The whole crowd of her kind—the People, as she named them—took care of her, though the one she loved best was the one Dar Oakley called the Singer, whom she too called the Singer, with a word in her own tongue that meant the same thing, but not quite.

“His father was a Beaver,” she said. “His mother was a wave on the water, and her mother was a stick of wood.”

She lay down flat on her back and looked up at the sky and the fast, low clouds. “You ought to have a name,” she said.

It was strange to hear that, like flying out of fog into clear air, or maybe the opposite. “How do you get a name?”

She thought about that, batting a bug from her face. It seemed odd to Dar Oakley that her own thick hair, and the bands of hair over each eye, were nearly the color of the Fox pelt she wore everywhere. One of her names for herself was With the Fox Cap. “You think of what you’ve done, and where you’ve been,” she said. “A thing you did that no one else did. You take a name from what you are.”

Dar Oakley pondered this, as well as he could.

“I saw you in the Oak tree deep in the forest. Your name can be In the Oak Tree in the Forest.”

“There are a lot of Oaks,” Dar Oakley said. “And a lot of Crows in them.”

“Then which one is yours?”

Dar Oakley thought of the Oak tree from whose high dead branch he had first imagined a land of no Crows. It wasn’t deep in the forest but at the edge of the open grassland, the lea.

“All right,” said With the Fox Cap. “You will be Of the Oak by the Lea.”

“Still,” he said.

“And a secret name too.” She sat up suddenly, as though she had heard a call, or sensed a threat, though there was neither, and she looked straight ahead at nothing, and made a sound. He looked at her, wondering. She made the sound again. It was short and harsh and he could make it too.

“Dar,” he said.

“Dar of the Oak by the Lea.”

He tasted that. It named him alone among all the things and beings of the world. Surely no Crow but he had ever had it, but then there was no other Crow anywhere who had any name all his own.

Summer turned to autumn; she followed him everywhere, running fast as a hare on those long legs, leaping rocks and streams, calling to him when he vanished in the distance—how short their sight was! He followed her, too, to places she regarded as distinct and important, though he could rarely see a difference between them and the surroundings; some she wouldn’t go into, he couldn’t grasp the reason why—the name of the reason had no cognate in his own tongue, for there was nothing in his world that needed such a name. She’d speak it whenever she hesitated to enter a certain dim grove, but the name didn’t say she was afraid; she said it when she knelt by a cold spring no different to him than other springs, dipped her hands into it and let the water pour out of the cup of them before she drank, but she wasn’t just refreshed or satisfied. He never knew when she’d use the word, or whether when she did she’d then stay away or rush toward whatever it was.

What they both agreed on: there was no reason to go into the dark reaches of the forest that clad the high mountain on one side of her demesne and his, and stretched forever beyond the river plain the other way. She’d been lost there, and not even deeply in, when Dar Oakley found her; she told him that when she was back again among the People, they’d warned her—she could be led astray, and be taken in so far she’d never return.

Led astray? Taken in, by whom or what?

She gave names, but not of things in his memory of her words; and when he asked what things the names named, she seemed not to know or not want to say. How, he wondered, could you know the names of things, and not know the things?

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “It’s just not worth it. It’s unpleasant. You can’t fly—you can’t run. It’s not profitable.” He could see farther than she could, but she could see things that he could not.

Autumn, and the great roost rebuilt itself. Fox Cap sat and watched them gather in the old place—Dar Oakley could see her far off across the river, wrapped in a pelt but (as he had directed her) hiding away the Fox cap, so as not to alarm his friends and relatives. They questioned him anyway—like most beings they dislike a bigger one sitting still and staring at them—and even if now and then she left a hare’s carcass or scraps from a roasting for them, they’d still give her one eye. What was that one doing there, they wanted to know, and why didn’t she go away? Dar Oakley shook off their questions: It wasn’t his business, he told them; she hadn’t harmed one of them, had she?

It was in those gatherings at evening that Dar Oakley tried to explain to the Crows about names, and how it could be that they could each have one of their own that was no one else’s. Few understood what he was on about, and the rest argufied and scoffed. One or two defied the rest and queried him about it, glancing around themselves, as though waiting to be mocked.

“You,” said Dar Oakley. “You could have a name.”

“I already have a name,” the one he spoke to said. “Crow.”

The rest laughed, but the Crow was in earnest. “No, but why do I need another?”

“Well,” Dar Oakley said. “Suppose you’d done a big, brave thing—”

That got a laugh too, but Dar Oakley cried out above the laughter. “It was you, wasn’t it you, who once pulled an Eagle’s tail, made her drop that Rabbit she had?”

“Fish, it was.”

“Ah, yes.”

“Big one.”

“Tearing it to bits by the river, and you just went right in there to annoy her, tug her tail, and kept at it till she turned on you, and left the fish. Which we all got.”

“I got least.”

“So now we tell the story,” Dar Oakley said. “But who’ll remember one day that it was you?”

“I will.”

“And when you’re gone?” The Crows grew quiet; that wasn’t a subject to be mentioned lightly. “How would it be if ever after we around here could name you as the one who long ago did that?”

The Crow stared up and down and around as though unable to gather this thought to himself. “So?” he said at last.

“So your name. It could be Pulled the Eagle’s Tail.”

“That’s a mouthful.”

“Well,” Dar Oakley said. “It’s a story.”

“Have you got one?”

“Mine is Of the Oak by the Lea.”

That was greeted with rapturous hilarity, but the Crow now named Pulled the Eagle’s Tail didn’t join in. He did dash and jab at one who teased him, and the rest cried out on him for it, Hey, hey, but it was sleep time now and the elders were shushing them.

The next day a Crow who’d been nearby on that evening came to Dar Oakley alone at the feeding-place, and said in the lowest of calls that she wanted a name too, if she could get a good one.

Her name, when it was found—and the other names that began then to adhere first to this Crow and then to that one—in time they came to be passed on to young, who in the names carried their mothers and fathers; and their young added others all their own. The names were carried away with those who departed the flock. Over the course of a hundred generations the names (like the names the People bore) were worn smooth the way river stones are worn rolling over one another, until the act or the place or the habit or the tale at the heart of a name could hardly any longer be discerned: but it was there, and still is.

Winter was hard that year. Snow fell early, and hardly ceased; it hid the carcasses of animals dead of cold or predation so that the Crows couldn’t find them. In the winter roost the Crows at evening were quieter; no sense wasting energy socializing when a long night lay ahead, and no easy breakfast in the morning. Crows were spoken of who hadn’t returned to the roost at the blue hour: caught, lost, too weak to find food. In the deep woods a Deer family—mother, father, yearling—became trapped within a sort of palisade they’d unwittingly made: they’d tread down the snow in a wide circle, nosing for hidden vegetation, while around that beaten circle the falling snow piled higher, till it was too high to leap. Safe within from Wolves, they died of hunger.

Crows found them, watched till the warming sun softened them, saved their own lives.

Dar Oakley rarely saw Fox Cap. When he and others flew to the settlement to look for provender, they saw few People at all; in the snow People went in packs like Wolves to hunt, and kept all they caught. Best anyway to stay a safe distance from such big, hungry predators: word was that Crow feathers had been seen in the settlement, black on the snow. When Dar Oakley did glimpse Fox Cap, she was wrapped in furs, and the People made no friendly gesture toward him. Bound in snow like the Deer in their habitation. It was good to have wings.

When the roost broke up, the Vagrant left the flock, and Dar Oakley’s Younger Sister flew away with him, out of the flock’s and her family’s way and their disapproval of her choice, for the Vagrant had never ceased to be an outsider. “Very well,” Father said on learning of it from the Servitor, “but they’d better not come near our bounds ever again.” Dar Oakley was sorry about it, since in the throes of spring madness he’d hoped it would be him she chose; he was ready to leave with her forever, wherever, but no. His parents still had one of their young from the previous spring to help them—along with the Servitor, to whom Dar Oakley gave the name Mate of One Mated.

Where was Fox Cap? He went to the lake now charged with snowmelt, to the greening woods, and she was in neither place; she wasn’t at the grove she had a special name for, not at the Wellspring or the Tall Rock, which also had names that she’d told him but that he couldn’t remember unless he heard her say them. He felt old without her, without his father and mother, without a freehold of his own. Himself alone. “Make her your mate,” the Vagrant had said or sneered, on his way away with Younger Sister, who never once looked back.

There was no battle in that spring; the People brought no bounty to the Crows and their hatchlings, and some of Dar Oakley’s flock regarded him resentfully, that he had nothing more for them. On a sultry day, suddenly hot, he was returning to the old demesne over the long moor from the lake and the settlement with a crowd of young ones who still thought he might produce something good if they stuck with him. The air was thick and wearying. Far off, daywise, silent lightning gleamed through clouds gray and white as a Goshawk’s back.

Dar Oakley was thinking about the People, and why they did what they did, when the flight of Crows was struck by a sudden gust, first breath of a gale, and in a moment he was alone in a shifting world, pummeled as though by something alive. Unable to hold to a direction, he was tossed far and fast, the wind bowling him bill over tail; the dark clouds came on fast behind and above as though to catch and swallow him. He wanted the cover of dense Fir-woods to break the wind and hold off the rain, but already he had been blown far from such places that he knew of. The first hard drops struck his wings and head even as he saw a stand below that looked safe—the wind as though taking pity on him threw him that way. It was nearly dark as night now, and would be darker in there where those black trees were thrashing the rain. Almost he felt as Fox Cap did, that he was being warned away from the grove, even as the wind propelled him in.

Anyway safe. He held tight. Rain falling that heavily could have driven him down to earth if he’d been in the open, maybe drowned him in mud. He’d heard of that happening.

The wind diminished. He flitted and groaned and shook his wet head. When he stopped, he heard those sounds continue: flit, shake, groan. He wasn’t alone in that stand. The noise of rain rattling through the Fir-limbs made the sounds of a wet bird hard to locate, and Dar Oakley peered this way and that—even a Hawk would seek shelter from this storm—when a distinct croak came from right behind him.

A large and seemingly elderly Raven sat perched on a branch behind and just above his own.

The bird took no notice of Dar Oakley, only stared into the dripping branches and the white world of rain beyond. Still Dar Oakley took the precaution of taking two sidewise steps away. He would be careful not to speak if not spoken to, as was the Crow custom with Ravens. But with a further glance he realized he knew this bird: he had seen it elsewhere.

“Master Raven,” he said, not able to discern its sex. He becked as respectfully as he could in the wet. The bigger bird turned one eye on him, and then away again. “Master Raven,” Dar Oakley said again, too curious now to notice the snub, “I have seen you before. You and another. Master, you were there, weren’t you, when the People”—the strange People word used for themselves came unconsidered out of Dar Oakley’s mouth, and the Raven turned again to look at him: not as though to acknowledge a Crow, but as though surprised to hear that word from one—“when the People left those others dead, and we all ate, and yourselves too—”

“The battole,” said the Raven.

That was the first Dar Oakley heard that word for the thing, the thing he could think about but not name: a word in Raven speech for the unpronounceable word in the speech of ymr ymr that Fox Cap used. Now it was his.

“The battle,” he said. “Yes.” A streak of lightning. Thunder broke with a sudden, singular noise. Dar Oakley had heard of birds slain in the air by the mere force of a thunderclap, dropping dead from air to earth. “That was good eating,” he said, and eyed the Raven, but whether the Raven agreed, or cared what a Crow thought about that day, was hard to know. “And to see how those People went among the other People their fighters had killed, and hacked and cut and shouted at them. How they wrapped up their own dead and kept us from them.”

The Raven said nothing.

“Strange,” Dar Oakley opined.

“Is gnot,” the Raven said, in so low a mutter that Dar Oakley wasn’t sure he heard it. He waited; just when he believed there would be no more, the Raven spoke again.

“You have gnot lived among them as we have.”

“Oh. Ah,” Dar Oakley said, humbly he hoped.

“For uncounted seasons,” the Raven said in his hoarse Ravenish growl, “in forests far billwise from here, in lands where many of them live. Have seen battoles far greater than that one, as many People as are Crows in winter roost, all fighting and killing. And after, we were not prevented from going among them.”

“Crows, too?”

“I did not perceive that those People could tell difference, Crow or Hraven,” the Raven said, as though this had been the greater wonder.

Dar Oakley thought of it, of People in many places far away, Crows and Ravens alongside them after battles as he and his flock were alongside Fox Cap’s People. Eating the flesh of the carcasses that the People had made. Maybe it was common, but that didn’t make it less strange. It made it more strange.

“I wondered,” he said, “if they really knew that those dead were dead. The way they went on fighting with their dead bodies, or cherishing their own.”

“They gnow,” the Raven said. “I will tell you now, Crow, what we Hravens learned long ago, so that you may understand.”

Dar Oakley thought of saying some grateful word but couldn’t think of one, and said nothing.

“The People,” the Raven said, “believe that dead People are still alive. In their flesh and even in their dry bones.”

“They can’t,” Dar Oakley said. “They can’t believe that.”

“They do. They believe that dead can feel insults and honors. When everything they are is rotted past even Crows’ relishing, and sunken in earth. When living have made holes in earth and cached those bones in them and covered them over again.”

“No.”

“They think those ones are among them still, as they were before. They visit them in places where they died, or they avoid those places, it might be for years, thinking that dead still remain there, angry or vengeful.”

Dar Oakley had hardly understood all this in the Raven’s high speech. “I thought you said, Master, that they put them under the ground and cover them up.”

“They do. Or they burn them to black nothing in fires. No matter. Wherever those dead are, they are Realm: realm of dead People—like realm of living ones. From that realm they issue to reach People who are living.”

“Realm?” It was a name or a word Dar Oakley didn’t know.

“Realm,” the Raven said. “Like realm of Hravens. I suppose even Crows may be realm.”

Dar Oakley didn’t know if the Crows were a realm. A place, was it, where they collected, like a roost? A realm. He swallowed the Ravenish word like a nutmeat, and it was his.

A realm of dead People. Strange birds, he thought, Ravens, to think up such a thing. “Well, I’d like to go there, wherever it is. And see.” He cocked his head, to show it was a joke.

The Raven lifted its broad wings. The rain had passed, and gusts of cold wind searched the evergreens. “If you eat dead Them for long enough, Crow,” the Raven said, “perhaps you will.”

Without farewell, the black bird pushed off and into flight.

When Fox Cap at last came and found Dar Oakley again, she had grown even more—so much more that he wondered for a moment if she was she. But no one else would wear the Fox cap but she, and no one else would speak to him, and listen to him speak.

He was overjoyed. He didn’t know why. They wandered together. She seemed to have gone farther away than the settlement on the lake, to somewhere where things were not the way they were here, as the Vagrant had once claimed to have done; and had seen things there she wouldn’t speak of, or for which she had no words. She was like the answer to a puzzle he hadn’t yet been set—though that wasn’t a thought that the Crow Dar Oakley was then could think.

So happy was he, so wanting to bring her back within his compass, that he took her to see a thing that was his, which he had told no one, no other Crow, about.

“What?”

“You’ll see.”

“Is it far?”

“Close. Very near. Right there.”

She laughed, seeing nothing. All around the grasses bent and gestured in wind. He had taken her to a little rocky outcropping hidden by a thornbush. He looked and listened, making certain no Crows were near. “Here,” he said. He poked his head in beneath the bush where she should look. She got to her knees and peered in under the leaves into a gap in the rocks.

“Mine,” he said.

Perhaps he believed, then when he was young, that no other Crow had ever gathered a treasure as he had done. Of course many do—they’re famous for it—but they never, ever tell where theirs is, or say a word of its existence. Older Crows know very well that their friends and neighbors might harbor precious things, and if a Crow is seen picking up a thing, inedible, useless but intriguing, and carrying it off, that Crow might well be followed; and if she sees herself followed, she might drop that thing as though it’s of no interest to her, rather than reveal where her true things are hidden.

“You can’t have them,” Dar Oakley said.

There was a half of a mussel shell, showing the opalescent inside—he turned it over for her to see. There were some pieces of mica, drab as dry leaves until he lifted them into the sun. Pebbles showing bands of glittering quartz. A fragment of a broken People silver bracelet—she recognized it—and a bit of glass. Dar Oakley doesn’t remember now all the things that were in it; he laughs to think of what they might have been, and what he’d later steal and hide in other times and worlds: some much worse than precious.

“But it’s all,” Fox Cap began to say—all nothing—but she’d grown wiser as well as longer in that cold winter and that harsh spring. She only touched each thing gently, while Dar Oakley looked on in deep anxiety.

Why do they do it, make these collections, visit them in secret to mull over them like misers? Only they know—they, and perhaps other beings who do the same, who also love to keep a hidden pile of glitter.

“All right, all right,” Dar Oakley said sharply, unable to bear the exposure longer. Fox Cap was a threat to secrets, so noisy and obvious—who’d followed her, and spied on them? He decided he’d have to move it all to a new spot next morning.

Fox Cap touched his head, smoothed the feathers there that he couldn’t reach, parting them gently with a fingernail. “I’m glad to see that,” she said.

They went away from there to go around the snares that Fox Cap had set on the moor, and Dar Oakley from above directed her to a little Rabbit caught in one. She showed him how the snare worked, but he knew already: the Crows had found them, and seen the People collect the prizes, mostly too quickly for Crows to profit. She opened this Rabbit with a knife and put its innards before him: her thanks for his gift.

“Tell me,” Dar Oakley said, when his bill wasn’t full. “What is a ‘realm’? Do you have a word for that?”

“How can I know what a word in your speech means?” she said. Her sharp knees poked up atop her long forelegs where she sat in the grass. She wasn’t yet full-fledged, he thought, or however the People would say it. It took them so long, not just a season but year upon year.

“A Raven said that word to me,” he said. “It’s not a word of mine or ours. This Raven said that the Ravens are a realm, and People are too; it’s not just a place where they are, or it’s not only that. You can be there but not go there, it seems.”

Fox Cap thought about this, and plucked a long grass to chew and help her think. “So,” she said, “a realm is what you are where you are.” She thought more. “No. It’s where you are when you are what you are.”

What was he? What he was when he was without Fox Cap wasn’t what he was when he was with her. If hers was a realm different from his own, how far would he travel in it before it was his own, and he couldn’t return?

“This Raven told me,” Dar Oakley said, “that there is not only a realm of Ravens, and a realm of People, but also a realm of dead People; and in their realm they are not dead, or are alive still in some other way.”

“Ravens are wiser than Crows,” Fox Cap said.

“Is there such a realm? Where dead People are, but not dead?”

“When they are there, they are what they are.”

Dar Oakley shook his head; his thinking was running too fast. “Can you,” he asked, not knowing why he thought Fox Cap would know, just a child after all, huge as she was, “can you go to a realm, or be of a realm, where you aren’t what others are?”

“You can sit beside others who aren’t what you are. You and I do.”

“But you aren’t then in their realm. Are you?”

“You tell me.”

“Can you go to, can you be in, or of, the realm of dead People if you are not as they are? Not dead?”

“I can’t,” she said. “But I am I.”

“Can I?”

“You!” She leapt to her feet, startling him from the Rabbit (who was in no realm but this one). “You carry them!”

“Carry who?” He was suddenly afraid, and defecated nervously.

“The dead People,” Fox Cap said, displaying her open hands as though she had something in them, though there was nothing. “You carry them or take them or lead them. Your kind. Everyone knows that.”

He gaped, open-billed.

“Death-birds,” she said. The wind groomed the speechless grass. “It’s what you are when you are there.”

Death-birds.

Almost as one being the flock comes winging over the moorland by the lake, where below the fighters scurry on their feet and legs toward the fighters coming toward them. Seen from above, it’s as though their feet proceed from their hairy heads and then from their backs in turn. So many of them, each one seeming to go his own way, all scattering to engage the others one to one, but the Crows, no, all together above, single of purpose.

It is no part of the Crows’ concern to wonder why the People do this. For these Crows it’s a living, the dead the People make, and insofar as any Crow heart feels gratitude, they feel it. They are first in the field, days before Ravens or Vultures, because they alone have learned the signs: the fires on the mountainside in the night, the thudding sounds that enlarge the People’s voices hugely, the penning of the beasts and children. A few days before this day, some of the Lake People who went off billwise returned, driving ahead of them a complaining herd of Cattle, which the ones in the settlement greeted with shouts and leaps and the beating of drums, and the Crows had come to recognize that as a sure sign that soon others would come and give battle, take back the Cattle if they could.

And here they are, fighters, more than ever before. So far the People have always chased off those who come to contest with them, but it was easy to see that this could change. If the Lake People were driven back, these others would overrun their dwellings and fields. There would be provision in plenty for Crows then, too much to take. And if the Lake People were all killed and butchered, every one? The Crows have come to depend on the People and their waste and their battles. They have an interest now in all that happens on the beaten grass below.

At dawn, before the two People bands engaged, the Lake People brought out of their settlement a number of males, bound in the way the People bind a Deer they have caught. Things that the Crows couldn’t name, strings of beads and stones and glitter, were hung around them; one looked sick and old; one struggled, the others didn’t, their heads hanging low or held high, waiting. The Singer in his wagon came out, and gave each of them drink from a cup he held to their lips. He sang or spoke a long while, and then two tall, strong ones stepped up and slashed with great weapons at the throats of the kneelers, who tumbled over gently into the grass. Females rushed ululating to them, and with pieces of the wrappings they make, they soaked up the blood.

In all that time the opposing People were coming closer. At the death of the kneelers, they groaned a great groan—those that could see it done—but whether in rage or fear or excitement no Crow could say.

Then it went forward as it did and does, and now the wheeling Crows look down at People who appear to them as lumps of joined heads and arms and feet; they perch in crowds in the trees and then again sail out across the field, impatient, hungry. Impossible to assess what’s going on below. Carriers drawn by Horses plunge in among those on foot—the ones in the carrier take great whacks at those who claw at them to drag them down. Do they all delight in this, as they seem to? Is it laughter, that sound they make with mouths wide? Some have got themselves right up onto the backs of Horses, and kick the Horses’ sides to make them run—they seem the gladdest, and when the attackers are turned back and begin to flee, they make the Horses run after them, stabbing at the fleeing ones with their long, fang-tipped spears and treading their fallen and squirming bodies under the Horses’ hooves. Then a Horse and rider are pulled down and a crowd of the others fall on them like their Dogs falling on meat.

On this day, once again, the Lake People drive off the others. Those of their fighters left alive exult; they grapple with one another, not to do harm but, as it seems, in friendship, though no being that Crows know do that in sign of friendship. Those who didn’t fight gather around the fighters, and lift some to their shoulders, from where they raise weapons down which the blood runs.

In the long bars of late light Dar Oakley on the field went from one dead fighter to another, looking into their faces, if they had faces to look into. Who are you now? he wanted to ask. Dead as you are, where do you go?

Fox Cap had said to him, You carry them. Your kind. But that was absurd. How could Crows ever carry them, and why, lifeless and eviscerated as they were? Yet he felt they called or pleaded.

“Afraid?”

Dar Oakley started and leapt. It was that Crow named Eagle’s Tail.

“No reason to be,” Eagle’s Tail said. “Not of these ones.”

“No.” Dar Oakley lifted his head. “It’s late,” he said.

Night came too soon for Crows to feast, a disappointment. Those who dared to begin on the dead even as the living went among them had got a taste. No matter: already flies were arriving to mate on this flesh and lay their eggs, and in the last of the hot days the wealth would only grow richer in the maggotry and the sun.

When autumn came that year, the flock broke in two without ever agreeing on it, which they couldn’t have done. Many made a new roost, away from the old place by the river, amid the Alders and the Oaks of the foothills above the People’s settlement. From there they watched the People, which some at least visited every day, sometimes profiting, sometimes not. By the time the days were cold, their new roost was the larger one. It was where Dar Oakley roosted, though his parents, no.

The Crows then knew only two seasons. In one, the days grew ever shorter and colder until they ceased to, and began to lengthen again. That season had one name. When the Crows began to feel the lengthening of the days and saw the sun rising each morning a little farther billwise, they called that season by another name. I’ve written spring and summer, autumn and winter, because we People have thought for so long in fours, but that wasn’t how Crows thought, or how they think now. Neither did People: not in that land then. The difference was that the People marked a single day, or night, when the season of the long sun changed to the season of the short sun. One day that led to winter, and one that led back into summer. Dar Oakley thought that perhaps Summer was a realm, and Winter another.

Not long after the day in this year when (by the People’s reckoning) summer turned to winter, a day of silver mist and leaves golden and falling, Dar Oakley came down from the mountainside roost to find Fox Cap. He knew no more than before about what a realm might be, but when he talked to her—when he listened to her talk—the world around would alter, as when a mist lifts and things that seem vague and close are seen to be far-off and distinct. When he was alone with Crows, the world was simply wide and near and known. It was seen. With her he sometimes felt, deliciously, almost afraid to fly: What would he encounter?

She wasn’t by the lake, nor on the tall rocks. She was not on the margins of the forest, cracking nuts and looking into the darkness of the trees. Not in her cap in her usual places, nor in his.

She was gone.

Now and then he had seen People pack things in a carriage, and with their beasts in tow go off billwise, the direction where the Raven said many, many more of them lived. They’d return, eventually, their carriage full of different things. Dar Oakley hadn’t ever seen one as young as she go with these travelers. But up on the palisade, by the skulls of enemy fighters—more were honored there now—he kept watch.

So he saw the Singer carried out from his house one morning, two strong men bearing him, who seated him gently on the beaten and grassless earth. He looked up to where Dar Oakley perched, and gazed with his large, unblinking pale eyes at him. It made Dar Oakley quite uncomfortable. He looked away, preened beneath his wings, raised his head to study the sky, changed his place. The Singer went on regarding him. Dar Oakley expected him at any moment to begin to sing, and what would that song compel him to do? Instead a female came from the largest of the houses, the one from which the smoke never ceased rising, bringing a pot that she put beside the Singer. Still watching Dar Oakley, he put his hands into the pot and drew out gobbets of fat, broken bones with the flesh still clinging to them, other matter that Dar Oakley didn’t recognize. He laid it all on the ground before him. The other People, the Dogs, indeed everyone but a spying child half-hidden, went away. The Singer raised his hand to Dar Oakley, then with it showed him the feast.

Of course the Crow wasn’t going to be taken in by that. Settle on the earth amid these People, whether they were in hiding or not, crippled or not? He laughed.

It did look good. Fox Cap loved the Singer. How much did that count for? Dar Oakley was hungry, too: never not.

Crows are hardheads, not easy to fool. That’s what they think about themselves, and they like to prove it by telling stories about a Crow who does get fooled—they laugh and laugh, to show they never would be. But there are stories too about a Crow so skeptical and wary that she misses something good.

A story was beginning now, Dar Oakley knew that. He knew that he was in it, the example. He just didn’t know what kind it was. He shat, he felt his heart run fast, he let himself down into the compound.

For what seemed like a long space the Singer hardly moved, only watched Dar Oakley eat and eat. With every bite the Crow looked up at the Singer and around the compound, then bent to eat, then looked up. Amid meats cooked in the way the People liked them there were uncooked meats. The Singer took one of these raw bits and chewed it slowly, but nothing more. Only when the bird ceased, crop full, did he speak.

“I don’t know your speech,” he said in the People’s tongue. “But I think you may know mine.”

Dar Oakley understood the words, different though the sound of them was from Fox Cap’s. He becked with all the courtesy he could. Except for Fox Cap—and those defeated fighters he had eaten—this was as close as he had come to one of the People. He wished he could ask this one where Fox Cap was.

“She is gone,” the Singer said, startling Dar Oakley. “They came and took her cap of a Fox pelt. She went to take it back from them.”

Dar Oakley wanted to question him, but he had only Crow speech. The Singer said no more. He put his hands flat on the ground on either side of him, lifted his body a little, and pushed himself backward a small distance. Then he did it again. He moved in this way back toward the dark doorway of his house, his thin legs trailing. Dar Oakley watched with one eye and then the other as the Singer bit by bit withdrew inside, a Fox into its den. Dar Oakley stepped to the door, but he thought nothing could induce him to go in. He could see the Singer in there, and the glitter of a small fire, and things hanging that he couldn’t name. The Singer had lifted himself to a low seat, and busied himself with a small pot for his fire. Dar Oakley gave a hushed, inquiring call, but if the Singer couldn’t understand him, it was no use asking him anything. What could he do? He went inside, first his inquiring head, then a foot.

The Singer, as though not noticing that a Crow was in his house, put the pot on the fire. With such pots and fires Dar Oakley had seen the People prepare their foods. This pot was empty, but as it heated, the Singer, speaking words meaningless to Dar Oakley, took up from somewhere a handful of dry leaves, which he threw into the pot, and then another handful of something else. Smoke arose.

Crows are not excellent smellers. They hunt and forage by sight and find their cached food by memory. Not that they have no sense of smell, but for the most part they don’t go by it. Smoke, though, is another matter: they have a strange affinity for it. The smell that arose from the pot the white-hair set on the fire, that arose in the smoke and into Dar Oakley’s nostrils, would in a sense never go away from him; in later times, in places far from here, any whiff of it, or any air that bore anything resembling it, would carry him away, for a moment or for longer, to when he first went into the realm of the two-legs, where they spoke and said ymr ymr.

Now, said the Singer to him, and Dar Oakley heard that word, and understood it, though at the same time he knew the Singer hadn’t spoken. Now tell me your name.

Crow, Dar Oakley said.

Crow, said the Singer, and smiled and laughed, pleased.

He and the Crow not only understood each other now, but somehow they spoke the same tongue—not as Dar Oakley and Fox Cap had spoken together, each in a different one, but in the same—whether his, or the Singer’s, or another that was neither, he couldn’t know.

They came and took her cap, the Singer said. She has gone to take it back from them, and I am afraid for her.

He picked up from near him another pot, or a thing like a pot, but covered over with something that might be the hairless skin of an animal.

Who has taken it? Dar Oakley asked.

You are her friend, the Singer said. I have called you to help me find her, and bring her back.

Dar Oakley wanted to ask, Back from where? But he thought where would get no better answer than who. He said, When she finds her cap, she will come home on her own.

The Singer shook his head side to side in the same gesture the Crows make to say no. They want her cap, he said, but even more, they want her.

He took a thin, long, knob-ended bone, and with it began striking rhythmically on the taut skin of the pot he held, which produced a noise louder than Dar Oakley would have guessed. They want her. It seemed to Dar Oakley that he was at long last about to be told something that even Fox Cap would not reveal to him: that the People, who preyed on animals large and small, were themselves preyed on, sought for food, by beings who were their predators and no one else’s. But the Singer didn’t continue that way. His eyes closed at the striking of the bone.

If you will help, he said, I will guide you to the place, though I may not enter it.

Where is this place? Dar Oakley asked.

At that the Singer hesitated, and the dark space, the pale man, the dull fire, all changed back into what they had been before those leaves were burned, though Dar Oakley hadn’t really seen that they had ever become different to begin with; and then with the striking of the bone they became again sharper, larger, more.

Is it, Dar Oakley said, a realm?

The Singer smiled to hear the word. A realm, he said.

Whose?

Ours, when we are there.

The ceaseless beat of the bone on the skin made it harder to hear, but easier to understand. Dar Oakley said, How far?

I will go with you, the Singer said, as far as ever I can. But they will bar the way to me. You are a stranger to them; you can pass.

When?

Soon. Today. Now.

The dark and stifling place was now darker than when Dar Oakley had entered it. Day was going.

Too late, he said.

Dark is day there, the Singer said. He extended a long white hand toward Dar Oakley, a hand that was to Fox Cap’s as a Falcon’s foot was to Dar Oakley’s. It’s light enough, he said. Come.

Dar Oakley once said to me, I remember how I came to agree to do as he asked, and how he and I went out from that place and abroad. But then he said, No, what I remember is that I don’t remember, that I didn’t know. And that was the way it was and would be, as I’d learn: I could always remember how it was to go out to there, to that place and to others in that realm, but all I’d remember was how I always forgot.

What he remembers: flying over the People’s scored land and the bent backs of those who cut the golden-headed grasses growing there, and then to the margins of the lake. The Singer was there with him, traveling as fast as he did himself—how could that be? But when the Singer went out over the wrinkled gray waters, Dar Oakley could no longer see him, and he thought it must be that he had gone under those waters; and he remembered how Fox Cap had told him that the Singer’s mother was a wave on the water, so (he guessed) that would account for that, and yes, when he reached the island in the lake, he saw the Singer come dripping out of the lake and somehow stride onto the shore.

In the center of the island—Dar Oakley hadn’t noticed it before—was a sort of circle of four large stones standing upright like People. Amid those stones was a flat one, nearly swallowed up in nettles and woodbine, that the standing stones seemed to look down upon. To this stone the Singer bent. He stooped so low his chin nearly touched it, and his long arms were stretched across it, feeling along its edge for handholds. With a long cry he lifted the great stone, staggering, and moved it some ways away. Dar Oakley on a branch of an Alder watched this in—well, you couldn’t say in disbelief, because a Crow believes what he sees; he watched.

Beneath the stone was not damp earth and grubs wriggling from the light but a hole, Dar Oakley couldn’t see how deep. The Singer bent to look into the hole as though to question it, and a wind that came up out of it stirred his hair. He was lean and white as a fish. He sat down on the hole’s lip, pushed the skirts of his wrapping between his legs, and slid down in.

Come, he called to Dar Oakley, or perhaps he only looked up to where the bird sat. Dar Oakley waited to see if this command would make any sense to him. Come?

Come in, the Singer said. He went farther in. The hole was deep, and soon only his head was still visible.

I can’t go in there, Dar Oakley said. Just the thought of the close, earthy darkness made his feathers compress around him.

You can. You must.

The Singer disappeared entirely. Dar Oakley, in distress such as he hadn’t known before, dropped to the edge of the hole in the ground and put his head in. It was darker down in there than any darkness he had ever looked into, darker than his mother’s underwing, darker than the backs of his eyelids closed in the night.

Hurry, he heard the Singer say.

I can’t. I can’t see in the dark. I’m not an Owl.

There’s no dark, the Singer said. Come.

Out of the blackness the Singer’s white hand and arm appeared, and Dar Oakley thought he could see farther down the glitter of an eye. With a hopeless cry he hopped off the hole’s lip and onto the flat of the Singer’s hand, and was lowered into blindness.

It was indeed light enough out under the sky (how they had gone out under the sky is what he can’t remember now), though it didn’t seem to him to be a sky you could fly up into. Dar Oakley kept to a low flight, as though he might strike it if he went up too far. Below him the Singer crossed the moorland with great strides, leaving no path in the grass.

Then there came up over the rolling margin of the earth a dense wood, one without an end that they could see (for now the Singer seemed to be up beside him as well as down on the ground). If they kept on, there would be nothing else below them forever, a forest as dark and closed and unwelcoming as the hole in the ground where he had suffered. He hoped that it wasn’t where Fox Cap was lost, even as he knew for sure that it was; and the Singer was drawing or pressing him down to enter it.

But now when he came close to it, it wasn’t so drear. It opened up to them, sunlit and green (hadn’t it been late in the year when they set out?). The easy way to go within was clear, and they took it. There was a tall Oak there, not far from the field’s edge, all alone.

Your Oak is strong, Dar Oakley heard the Singer say, but the Birch is the wisest of the trees in this realm. The Birch knows all of life and death.

I’ll rest, Dar Oakley said, and sat a branch of the Oak. It felt to him that he rested on an outstretched hand. Down below, a Boar—no, it was not a Boar but a Pig, one of the People’s beasts, like Boars but not—looked up from snuffling in the acorns.

The beings of this realm are these, the Singer said, his voice—if it had ever been a voice—grown dim: the Birch, the Roe Deer, the Lapwing, the White Stag, the Pig, the Little Dog. Listen when they speak, but don’t answer.

Dar Oakley had never been spoken to by any of these, and never by any tree. Yet the black Pig in the mast looked up and considered him, as no beings but his own and the People ever did.

Crow, the Pig said.

Dar Oakley made no answer.

Crow, you have taken something from my mother that does not belong to you.

No, Dar Oakley said, I would not do that.

The Pig considered this. Very well, he said, but one day you will. And ever after you will regret it.

Dar Oakley did not know what regret might be; no Crow then had ever felt it. Listen but don’t answer, the Singer had said, and Dar Oakley clapped shut his bill. The Pig returned to his mast, as though he hadn’t spoken at all, but Dar Oakley felt that now he might proceed farther in. He flew from the Oak to a Birch down along the open way, and took a perch on a low branch.

Pay no attention to the Pig, he heard. Remain with me. If you go farther, you will regret it.

Who said that? No one and nothing was near. Only the Birch he sat in. Dar Oakley was here alone: the Singer was gone. The forest waited in stillness to see what he would do, go or stay.

He called.

He called in his own tongue, not in the language in which he and the Singer had spoken, nor the language of the Pig and the Birch. A plain call of inquiry that, where he had been born, would very soon have brought a response; he would have heard Who are you? We’re right here! Go away! What do you see? Any of that. But Dar Oakley heard nothing, only felt the forest shudder, as though no such sound had ever been made there.

Then down on the ground in the low undergrowth he saw a flash of red: a Fox slipping off, looking back to see or hear him, then vanishing.

He went that way. At once the forest changed, or what he could see of it changed. Something had happened to his sight: everything he looked at in every direction seemed larger and closer to him than it should, distinct and looming; but things farther off faded quickly into irresolution and vagueness, startling him as he came closer by suddenly turning into what they were. As now: he caught up to that Fox, now walking upright on its hind legs, and he knew who that was; and not far beyond, in a clearing where sunlight fell slantwise and dusty, why, it was a whole crowd of People, clear and vivid as anything; how could he not have seen them from the Birch where he’d sat? More than a Crow could count, they sat on seats they had placed there for themselves. Their big shaggy heads turned this way and that, grinning, cheeks like blushed haws. In their great hands they held pots of drink. And more of them came in sight, grinning and hale, bringing in burdens, armloads of their golden grasses, carriers full of things, foods, small animals, orange apples.

Only none of them made a sound. No being anywhere, not in the trees or the sky or on the forest floor, made a sound Dar Oakley could hear.

Fox Cap—now herself complete—sat herself down among them. Her cap was on her head, for (just as he had thought she would) she’d got it back from them. Those around her petted her and with their fingers they fed her this and that, a tiny wan thing amid their overbearing fatness.

So there was nothing to fear, was there? Her own kind, come to live in the greenwood, wasn’t that all right? If they’d stolen her cap, they’d given it to her again. It was all right.

Dar Oakley called in his own voice: It’s all right.

The People seemed to hear that, and looked around themselves, troubled; one took hold of Fox Cap in a grip that seemed not friendly. A little black Dog that had been prancing there before them turned and sought the source of that call, head snapping this way and that, teeth bared. Fox Cap sought too, looking up, rising from her seat though the others held her.

Dar Oakley flew nearer and called a third time into the silence, the universal everyday everywhere call, the Ka.

Remarkable. The many, many coming into the clearing halted at the sound, or turned to walk away again and vanished. There hadn’t really been that many after all; only the trees were thick. Ka: Those in the seats grew pale and perplexed, they lost flesh, withered—even the furs they were wrapped in faded and grew thin. Fox Cap, though, darkened, or brightened; she thickened, grew distinct, and saw him.

“Dar of the Oak by the Lea!” she cried, and he heard.

“With the Fox Cap!” he cried back to her, dodging over the heads of the People, stalling and hovering. “Come! Come away!”

At the real speaking of these names the People got to their feet, alarmed, staring and staggering this way and that like a flock of sparrows. Some had weapons, and struck out feebly with them at nothing or at one another. Fox Cap pushed them away from herself with one hand while holding her cap on her head with the other, dodging the People’s hands that reached to snatch it or hold her back.

As loud as he could, Dar Oakley shrieked at them, Get, all you! I’ll fight you! I’m so mad now! This is mine! Calls that a Crow would cry at another Crow in a fight; he knew no other ones. They seemed to cause the People pain. Fox Cap broke from them and ran out into the forest beyond, chased by the little black Dog.

Later Dar Oakley would remember that moment best, always with a blow to his breast but laughing, too: how that foolish young one had run not out but in, not toward but away from where he and the Singer had entered the forest. From branch to branch he went, in this forest that hated him, keeping her in sight, whether she appeared as Fox or Fox Cap, calling for her to stop. At last she did, and they fled together, girl and bird. The three black Dogs kept on in pursuit of her—Dar Oakley can’t remember when the one had become three, but they were now a lot larger too, heads as big as Horses’ heads and full of great teeth. They could do no harm to him—he could fly—and Fox Cap dealt with them as she did with bad Dogs in her home place: she’d eye them and kneel as though to pick up a stone to throw, and the cowardly Dogs would vanish, for a while. None of the pale People had followed, he couldn’t think why—soon they were all left behind, Dogs and People, and he and she walked on alone.

They walked a long time. Sometimes she wanted to hurry toward home; she’d ask him about the Singer and the People at the settlement, or tell him of all the things she’d been given that she’d bring back there, things that if he saw them he’d envy and want for his own treasure, though she showed him none of them. At other times she wandered aimlessly, as though she meant to stay in this realm forever. From a high hill she showed him settlements of People that went on a great way, far farther than his new short sight could reach. Roe Deer wandered there; one raised its sleek head to look their way.

It was turning winter again. He had ceased to be able to tell which direction they went in, couldn’t tell daywise from darkwise, the red sun appearing through the trunks at dawn where it shouldn’t be and seeming to stare at him amused. When had he last eaten?

“You must remember all this,” she said to him. “You must remember it, so that you can remind me if I forget.”

“All right,” he said, feeling it all run away from him even as he promised, so that he would have to re-create it, beast by tree, long after.

Then they were no longer there.

“Here we are,” she said, arms outstretched. The forest thinned; it began to cease, not as though they came out of it but as though it marched backward away from them as they stood still.

Here was the lake and the lake island. The rising land beyond.

“What realm was that?” Dar Oakley asked. “Was it . . .”

“The Happy Valley,” she said. She looked pale and hungry now, as the ones who sat around her had looked when Dar Oakley had called his call: filled with some distracted longing. But here wasn’t there.

“Why,” he asked, “did we come back by the way we did? When it wasn’t the way I went in?”

She was looking far off, hand shading her eyes. “You never come out the way you went in,” she said. “And if you go back in again, you never go by the same way.”

“Oh?”

“Because,” she said, “you never do go back anywhere. You only go on.”

She set off with her long stride into the grass. Dar Oakley flew to the old Oak from where he had first seen People, which—well, well!—stood there, right there. He called a farewell to her, thinking he might never see her again, though that couldn’t be so. Ka! he called. Just that. But as he said it—Ka!—the world around altered: the lake, the moor, the mountain heights, the running girl raising her hand without looking back, all flew away from one another, becoming a vastness that yet was sharper, far sharper, than before.

Dar Oakley had his Crow sight back.

The trees ceased looking at him, the sky didn’t ponder him, and the sun lost its face. The cold air rising from the lake was blue. The world around lay all open to his eye.

There, far off, over in that place there—he saw a shimmer of blue-black-violet iridescence: Crows on the ground, busy together at something. Clear as could be. What had they found there to eat?

He called again, Ka! Ka! and from as far off as his call could be heard, cries came in answer. Who are you and what do you want? they said, but Dar Oakley answered only Ka!, and the others called again, and together their calls wove the world. Another call came from another direction, clearly billwise, yes: Come closer and I’ll drive you off, you bet. Dar Oakley laughed, and at his laugh the dun fields and golden woods, the far river, the Crow demesne, grew stronger, plainer. His long sight looked over it. Ka was, and he was there.

Only when Fox Cap returned to her village did she understand that not one season but years had passed in the few days since she had gone into the forest after her stolen cap. Those she had known had grown older, and some were dead; new dwellings had been built, and new families lived in them. She nearly died of strangeness. The Singer, more aged but not changed, was the only one not surprised to see her, the only one not to keep a cautious distance from her. He took her in his arms as she wept, and for a long time she stayed with him, pale and speechless, and he cared for her.