Ka

CHAPTER THREE

When more years had passed, the Singer of the Lake People died. Though he had told the People that he would never die, that he was incapable of dying even if he wanted to, the People knew how to hear these words: they understood that like all the remembered dead he would forever be among them, that he would reach for their hands out of the places where he rested or feasted or went journeying (not far away, in fact as near to themselves as their own skins), and by his touch remind them of the honors still due him and of the many stories and sayings he had given them; and they in turn would take the hands of the unimaginable invisible ones who were not yet born but waited to be, one of whom would be the Singer again, at least in part, returning to them with new teaching and new help.

His dying took a long time. Long before it came near, he had knowledge of it. There was time, then, to make provision, to bring about what the People of that place would need when he wasn’t any longer among them noon and night.

There was the locating and circumscribing of forest groves where certain willful and tricksome powers known only to the People could be both honored and confined—Dar Oakley saw that some of the places were ones that Fox Cap had feared to enter when she was a child. His Crow mind could not perceive the faces and forms the Singer and the People cut into certain trees as warnings; but the warnings weren’t meant for his kind anyway.

There was the education of Fox Cap to complete. Dar Oakley only knew that this education was going on because of what she told him, and he understood little of it as well; but for long days she was with the Singer in his house, and even when she was with Dar Oakley, she wasn’t with him as she had been. What had always divided them—that she saw the world as full of beings alive and alert and looking at her, and he saw few, all of them in their ordinary bodies—only grew. She had come away from the realm where he’d sought and found her, but in another way she hadn’t, and remained there still.

“When you think about me and tell others about me,” she said, “you mustn’t say ‘she’ any longer. You must say ‘he’ instead.”

He considered her from where he stood on a rock by the lake’s water. The wrappings that all People wore were different for males and females, and the ones she wore were both and neither now.

“Why would I need to name you, or say ‘she’ when I think about you?” he asked. “And who would I tell about you?”

She seemed not to hear him. “I can’t be as I was,” she said.

“Why not?”

She looked sidewise at him as though she thought he must know why not, but then her eyes went elsewhere, to something that was not before her.

“Snakes shed their skin,” she said. “They come out new.”

“New but the same,” he said.

She thought. “Then I don’t know why. But it’s so.”

The weakness and dimness that had possessed her in the Happy Valley had long passed, but she had grown strangely tall and long and thin, her legs and arms like bare bones sheathed in skin and tendon, her torso narrow as a Weasel’s and as limber. Her Fox cap she had hidden away and no longer wore. Only her own russet pelt and brows.

“Well, I can talk that way if you like,” Dar Oakley said. “But talking can’t change that. Can’t change she into he.”

She slid down the muddy lake-edge to a pool where she’d seen a thing growing whose leaves or root she wanted. When she had it and broke a leaf and sniffed it, she put a handful into a skin pouch slung over her bare chest. “It’s because I can’t be called ‘neither,’ ” she said. “But that’s what I am.”

Dar Oakley wanted to say that in the language of Ka there was a way to speak of beings whose sex you didn’t know—it was so often hard to tell—though it wasn’t used if you knew them, no.

“All right,” he said.

She looked up at him from where she squatted in the wet, and he down at her, and an understanding grew between them: that they were both beings different from others of their kind, but not wholly different, and in that knowledge the difference between the two of them was lessened.

In the long days of his last summer among his People, the Singer liked to be taken up on the rocks that broke out of the mountain’s base and into the rolling lands. A strong man carried him to the high ledge there, and when he could no longer cling to that man’s back, two men carried him in a bed of wood lashed with hide rope and withies. Fox Cap followed, and where Fox Cap went, Dar Oakley went. Often the two People sat so long in still silence that Dar Oakley couldn’t bear it, and he flew off fast and far, rolling over in the air to shed the tension; but he came back—often to find them talking together.

“When we came here,” the Singer said to them, and his voice (which Dar Oakley knew now almost as well as he knew Fox Cap’s) was as strong and sweet as ever, “when we came to this place by that water, we were always sad, because our dead were not with us.”

“Yes,” Fox Cap said. From the ledge the lake could be seen, and also the way toward the region the People had once come from.

“Our houses had been built near where theirs were built, and we lived beside them. Then we were driven away, and they remained.”

He lifted a hand to where Dar Oakley stood on an outcrop, a little way off so as not to presume. “Crows have no houses,” the Singer said. “They may have places where they live, but a house, listen, a house has a place where it lives.”

Dar Oakley wondered if he should take this ill, but since he hardly understood it, he decided no.

“We hoped to go back one day,” Fox Cap said. “That’s why.”

The Singer nodded, so slowly that Dar Oakley wondered if he was dissatisfied with what Fox Cap said.

“Hear me now,” he said, and his eyes were lidded. “Our dead should be with us. Not drowned or wandering in the air or the forest. Not far away, either, in the places of our enemies, who can break into their houses, despoil the dead, scatter their bones.”

“They would never dare!” Fox Cap cried.

“I wish that they don’t,” said the Singer. “But I’ve seen them, our old dead, put out to wander the trackless places.” He put out his hand to draw Fox Cap closer. “Whether this has happened, or is still to come, I don’t know.”

Fox Cap rose suddenly from his side as though to take some action, but she only went to where the rock ledge ended and stood looking out, fists clenched. When she turned again, her face was—well, what was it? How hard it was to understand their faces! So much harder than to see the clear single meanings in a Crow’s regard. Her face was like her fists.

The Singer’s eyes closed. After a time those whose task it was this day to carry him made their way up the steep path, and seeing them, Dar Oakley rose away. He never assumed that People coming his way meant him no harm, and doesn’t assume it still.

At last the Singer ceased to come out of his house. Fox Cap was among those who were with him when he died, or seemed to die—she was unwilling to be so definite about it in speaking to a Crow. But Dar Oakley saw him carried out from the palisade, dead as dead. The People came around him, and with their music as Dar Oakley had learned to name it, a word of Ymr that had no cognate in Ka, they bore him from the village and up to the ledge of rock where he had liked to sit. Those who carried him, and those who went along beside, pointed out the single Crow that followed their tedious progress.

Already built there—Dar Oakley had from a distance watched it being made—was a frame of thick boughs lashed strongly together, as high as Fox Cap’s head. Up onto this thing the bearers and others who could get near enough to lay a hand on the bed heaved the Singer’s carcass, and laid it there on its back, the bare face upward. Dar Oakley watched this from a high place, and when the People began again their skull-shaking noise, he went higher. From beside the bier (no word for that in Ka), Fox Cap spied him. She left the People and began to climb the rocks up to where he was. She had the fistlike face. What did she want of him? Should he get away? Down on the ledge they were pushing away the wrappings and strings of beads and shells from the Singer, exposing the long white flesh.

“Call your kind,” Fox Cap called up to him. “Call them all now to come!”

Dar Oakley’s bill opened, but he couldn’t ask Why.

“It’s his gift, Crow!” Fox cap called. “His gift to you because you brought me home. To you and your kind. Don’t you see?” She flung her arm back toward the body lifted above the ground.

Bared, and lifted up to where no prowling, crawling things would reach it, no Dogs, no Hogs. Only fliers.

Yes, he saw.

“Yes,” he cried to her. “Yes, I will!”

Crows, who get much of their living from carcasses, haven’t the strength to get into them, not the big rich ones. They need the help of a carcass opener: a Bear, or a Lynx, or a Wolf, or the carcass’s own decay—but decay is not quick.

On the first day of the Singer’s lying out alone on the bier on the ledge, some cautious Crows visited, summoned by Dar Oakley—hadn’t he led them to good things, hadn’t he changed their lives, and why were they dawdling on the ground eating bugs?—but there was little to get after the eyeballs were eaten and the black tongue tugged at. The People stayed away from the ledge of rock so that the Crows when they came would not be startled or intimidated, and over the next day and the next more came in, only to fly off again.

Fox Cap was always there. She sat still, and sometimes covered her face; sometimes it seemed she spoke to someone. The few Crows at the Singer’s livid corpse were accustomed to her and paid her no mind; she wasn’t one of the children or the bent old ones who shooed birds from the grain or from meats drying by the fire. But when none of the Crows had done or been able to do the work required, she stood; she took up a fighter’s broad weapon, and clambered up onto the bier. Her face was wet. The Crows ascended with cries, surprised. After a moment—for gathering strength, overcoming reluctance, how would Crows know?—she lifted that weapon in both hands and drove it into the Singer’s breast beneath the bone. Bad airs were released, the bloated stomach sank. Fox Cap, crying strange cries, cut as far as she could down the Singer’s trunk, then cut across from side to side, pushing the skin and fat open with the flat of the weapon; the body jerked with the force of it and one arm was flung out. She threw the sword from her and climbed down and went to lie facedown on the rock ledge with her hands crossed over her head as though to hold it in place.

All this the fleeing Crows in bits and scraps related to Dar Oakley, who was winging in on his rounds.

So it was now. Dar Oakley called, the others called, Crows answered and came. A small black Crow crowd or cloud formed, and before day was done, they were clamoring at the bier, fighting for footholds, rising up and settling again. Dar Oakley too. Hungry too.

The yellow fat under the skin, exiguous in a wasted old man; the thicker fat beneath the kidney skin, better. Ripe fruit of pancreas and liver; the Crows had no special words for such parts, knew only the good and the less good. The stronger and bigger Crows muscled aside the others and tore away the bags of tissue that held the wealth, and when the Biggers were sated for a moment, the younger and smaller ones would get theirs. Dar Oakley got no deference for being the one who’d led them here, but he found himself at the middle of them, foot and bill deep within his former traveling companion, if indeed this was the same being as that—what answer would he get if he asked? Even as he thought that weird thought the eyeless sockets began to regard him, and the slack jaw tried to speak. Then there was a Dar Oakley there who went on partaking of the food, and another Dar Oakley who listened to the Singer’s voice; and the deeper he worked his way into the Singer, the clearer he heard it: until at last he understood how large was the gift the Singer had offered, and what he, Dar Oakley, had to do to secure it.

“Go!”

That was Fox Cap, risen, arms wide, face raised to them all.

“Go!” she cried again, waving them off. “Go, take him! Take him there, all you, bear him, carry him!”

The Crows arose, angry or baffled or unwilling, and Dar Oakley yelled at them in their own tongue, Go! Go! Now! They couldn’t refuse that. The black cloud formed with a thudding of wings and as one being they went this way, then that. Where? they called, and Here! Dar Oakley called. The Crows all in a gesture turned in the air over Fox Cap, whom they saw turn below them with the turning earth; Dar Oakley, winging out from amid them, went toward the lake glittering in the last light far away.

He felt the Singer beside him, or upon him, and he knew where he was to go even as he heard the Singer name it. The Crows complained, but had no reason not to follow as Dar Oakley led them to that tuft of trees and rock that was the island in the middle of the lake. People on the shore or out on the surface of the water in their boats with their nets, People who had long disliked the thieving Crows that stole their fish, looked up; but the Crows passed on, skimming the evening water, until at strength’s end they drove into the dimness of the trees.

Dar felt a weight that was not a weight drop from him there.

The other Crows, nearly but never quite colliding, found perches, still yelling. Why did we flee? What was that for? That was good eating! Where are we? What’s that Crow up to? I’m so scared now! They flitted and shat and told one another to shut up, shut up.

Dar Oakley tried to yell over their voices, but gave it up and only waited. From his place in an Alder he looked down into the clearing, expecting to see . . . what? Something, some arrangement of stones, that he had seen when last he’d come here. But when had that been? It went away even as he thought it.

Listen! he cried. Don’t talk, listen!

That took a while, and even when they were quiet, he could hardly begin to explain before being mocked or cried down in incomprehension. And how could it be otherwise? How could he tell them what he knew, that the People died different deaths than Crows did, that they went on beyond their deaths, in some realm neither place nor not, yet to which they must be somehow guided or carried or borne? And that it was the Crows who now were to do that service for them?

Across the water the People casting nets from their boats heard the commotion, and wondered at it, as People down through the ages have wondered about Crows yelling together, what are they carrying on about?

But there had never been a colloquy like that one. It went on till night put an end to it and continued again when it was light; it was carried on from the island to the river, from one end of the demesne to the other and through the new freeholds that Crows were claiming near the People’s spreading settlement. Some talked of running Dar Oakley off far and for good, a danger to all of them—though it was hard to say just what that danger was—and others defended Dar Oakley and his idea, insofar as they understood it. It would be good for Crows! They wouldn’t wait for long seasons between one battle and the next, they wouldn’t be driven off the body of a child drowned and washed up on the lakeshore—remember that? They wouldn’t be cursed or given signs of hatred by the People at their smokehouses and middens, no, because the People knew that when they themselves died, a congregation of Crows would guide them to where they should be, and cry in mourning all the way. There was no such place? There could be no such place? What did that matter? Of course there was no such place—but that’s the place they had borne that white-haired being to—so the People believed—and if the Crows could somehow carry him off and also return and go on picking at his carcass on the rock ledge till there was no good left in it, and that didn’t confuse the People, then why should it stop the Crows? To eat them is to carry them!

In the end no decision was come to, or needed to be. Crows do what profits them. It may be that some grasped what Dar Oakley said or described about the People; some who did thought it ridiculous, hilarious, and still do; and some—Dar Oakley’s Younger Sister, of all Crows!—were silent and almost sorry for the People in their never-ending deaths. Another world to suffer in!

What Dar Oakley never told them—what he could hardly tell himself—was that he had entered that impossible place or state, and returned. The Happy Valley. He, a Crow, had been in two places at once, but remained always himself. There was no explaining that: not in Ka. They in Ka would long believe they were simply playing a wonderful trick on the living People, and Dar Oakley wouldn’t tell them that perhaps (as in the many stories the Crows tell of Crows outsmarting themselves) the trick was in the end on them.

It is strange that beings who have no dead themselves, who shun death, who hardly know that they’ll each die someday, should have got that task, and kept to it for so long. Now there’s no call for such service, not in those parts of the world nor hereabouts, either. I wonder if they’re glad to have given it up, or if they even remember—all but one—how long they did it.

“Now what are they up to?”

A season had passed since the Singer’s transit. Three Crows sat on the dead branch of a tree a fair distance from the village, able to see clearly what the People did, but not why. One was named Kits, one was Cuckoo’s Egg, the third was Two Mates.

“Those are the trees they knocked down last summer, cut up small.”

“They are?”

“Yes, those that they’re putting in the holes they’ve dug.”

“With the stones.”

For a long time the People had been busy at a long, low hump of earth that rose from the fields daywise from their dwellings. What they were doing was puzzling, almost too puzzling to be interesting. But Crows with nothing else to do kept an eye on it, and gossiped about it. If they had understood what the People were doing, they might have thought it was the quick end of their new occupation, but they didn’t and it wasn’t.

First they’d felled tall trees—the knocking of their heavy tools on the trunks and the crashing down of the cut ones was alarming, at least for a time. One tree had an old Crow’s nest in it! What if it had been new? They cut off the big limbs and with their carts and Oxen they took them to this mound, where others with other tools were digging deep, making holes in the ground. There were many. When a hole was made, not rude but as tidy and purposeful as a nest, they laid boughs, all stripped of twigs and bark, to line it, just as a Crow would lay sticks inside a nest, with as many disputes and rethinkings too.

“What they’re doing,” said Kits, “is making a new kind of dwelling. Just like their other ones. But with the top going down into the ground, instead of up from it.”

That got a laugh.

“Well?” said Kits, for that’s what it looked like. And she wasn’t wrong: the People looked up now and then to see and ponder the observing Crows far off, and then returned to their task.

It was only certain People who dug and felled trees. Others observed and made comments. The Crows had come to notice this distinction: males mostly, sometimes bigger than others though not always, and their mates, who were more covered in—there was now a Crow word for this, because it was interesting and seemed important—in decoration, shiny, sun-catching, enviable things wound in their thick pelts or around their arms and fingers, and wrappings of bright colors, like Kingfishers. The males bore weapons different from others’ weapons, and when People rode in carts, it was they who rode while others walked.

“Those are their Biggers,” Cuckoo’s Egg said. “I’d suppose.”

No one disagreed. They could see, though, that those Biggers deferred to the one that Dar Oakley knew as With the Fox Cap but for whom the other Crows had no name. She bore no weapons; she was dressed simply, still neither as male nor female. She sat still. But she was the center of this, whatever it was.

Up on the rock ledge where the Singer’s body had been laid—the Crows could easily see that far—the bier remained, and now there were other biers nearby it. The place was marked with tall poles to which wind-stirred things like broad wings had been attached. The rock wall behind, which Fox Cap had climbed to stir Dar Oakley to action, had been scored in whorls and patterns, and marks that the Crows could not see as faces. The steep ascent to this place from the flat land had been widened, and steps cut for feet.

“Look there,” said Two Mates.

A group toiled upward there, bringing amid them a thing that was growing familiar to Crows—a thing of sticks lashed together with hide ropes, on which lay a figure bound in wrappings, only the white face visible as yet, but soon to be all bared.

“Ah yes,” said Kits.

“Looks small,” said Cuckoo’s Egg.

“Still,” said Two Mates.

“Time to go to work,” said Kits—or something resembling that in the tongue of Ka, which had no words for time or work. Kits whetted her long bill three times, clack clack clack, and they dropped down to greet the People climbing up.

Not all the People’s dead were brought there. Some were burned in great greasy fires whose smoke drove away every other living thing but People; some were put into boats with gifts or possessions around them, and the boat was sunk where the lake was deep. Some unfriended or inconsiderable People were just put in holes in the ground and covered up. But the warriors, the Biggers, their mates, their dead children: it was these ones that were given to Crows for the work they did. (That work with the dead, that practice, has a lovely and fearful name in our People language. It’s called excarnation.)

Dar Oakley schooled the Crows in how to behave near People now. No more loitering at the midden, quarreling with Dogs. No more petty thievery. No more riding the Hogs’ backs and digging the fat blood-filled ticks from their thick skin—it was beneath their new dignity. It was all good advice, and some Crows heeded it some of the time. Also, he said, they should notice when one of the People was carried into his dwelling and didn’t come out again; or when one grew swollen as a gorged snake with young about to drop. Then gather nearby, on the roofs of their dwellings, and show yourselves ready. Some of the Crows commenced doing this, though not many Crows can tell one of the People from another, dying or gravid or not.

“Fine,” said the Crow Kits to Dar Oakley, “but we aren’t Ravens; you know we can’t be as solemn as they can.”

“The People think that Ravens are wiser than Crows,” Dar Oakley answered. “But it might be that they can’t tell us apart all the time.”

“Ha! One or the other,” said Kits.

This Kits, by the way, had got her name because of a story about a mother Fox she’d seen.

That vixen had gone mad, she’d told the Crows. And was eating her kits.

Eating them?

Two, just born. She ate them both.

No! Nothing left of them?

Well, Kits had replied, not much. And she clacked her bill three times.

That story always got a laugh.

Kits was unmated, though surely old enough to be; she had a look about her different from Crows thereabouts, her head as black as her wings where their heads were duller, her plumage deepest blue-black, glossy and shot through with iridescence, violet and purple and even scarlet, that came and went. No one could tell Dar Oakley where in the demesne she’d been born or who her kin were—a vagrant, a newcomer, but that was long ago it seemed, during the time that had apparently passed while Dar Oakley was elsewhere. He found it hard not to stare at her, and he thought about her even when she wasn’t there, and said her name to himself: Kits. It was coming on spring.

“When the planting is done,” Fox Cap said to him, “and the lambing and calving are over, then we’ll go. You’ll come too.”

Dar Oakley never stopped marveling at the way she, and all her kind probably, could think forward into seasons not yet come, what might happen then and what they’d do. It was like the way they thought about seasons past, and regretted or rejoiced at what they’d done then.

She stood, arms crossed, by the lakeshore. Mist rose from the still-icy surface, drawn away gently by dawn winds. The island in the center of the lake was leafless, pale and transparent, as though it could be reft away too by the moving air. There the Singer’s bones had been taken when even the Jackdaws were done with them; they’d been put under the ground in a great pot, and a number of tall stones were borne out over the water with great effort (one lost in the depths) and set up, as tall as stone People, around the place. Dar Oakley could not have seen those stones standing there before the Singer’s bones were placed in the center of them, and yet he knew he had.

Fox Cap spoke of him often, and had decided that she must do what the Singer had asked: she and the People would return to the place from which they had first come, where their old dead lay; and they would bring those dead here. To the upside-down houses that the People here were making for them.

So Kits was right: houses for People not to live in but to be dead in.

“We’ll all go,” Fox Cap said. “Everyone here. All of you, too.”

“It’s a busy time,” Dar Oakley said, looking away. “Young just born. All the care.”

“Not for you, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea. You’re like me.”

She meant unmated, single, free.

“Well,” he said. “I don’t know.”

Fox Cap turned to him, as though roused from her thoughts. “Don’t know what?”

“Well, I don’t know, anymore,” he said, and flitted in embarrassment. “That’s all.”

It had happened to countless Crows for countless generations, but of course for every Crow to whom it happens, it happens for the first time in the world. What Dar Oakley felt as the season turned was that his being had doubled in size, because his being included another’s. How could that be? How could it be that someone so swift, so smart, so big, could come to be part of himself? Wherever he happened to go as the days lengthened, like as not he’d find Kits already there, or arriving soon after, surprised too, but not as surprised as he was.

“You,” she’d say. “I know you.”

There was, he thought, some strand of something that connected them, something they couldn’t see or feel, some tightening web. Wonderful. Later on though he’d think, Well, she just kept her eye on me and knew where I might go, and went there too, which seemed just as wonderful, really, if you thought about it, which at the time he couldn’t have done. He’d just marvel, and beck suavely, and say his name, which he couldn’t help but think she knew well enough.

She was rarely alone anyway, wherever she was. Males he’d never seen before would cluster around her, seemingly distilled out of the black earth or the rocks—rage that they dared approach her, that she should accept their presence! For the first time he understood that gloomy and suspicious Crow his father. Not that any of them mattered to her; she’d up and fly off in an unhurried way as though vanishing and leave them all behind, and Dar Oakley, too, to stare at one another. How could she go so slow so fast? If he got his courage up and beat after her, she’d stay always ahead of him; he’d lose sight of her and then in banking and turning this way and that he’d spot her far ahead, resting, not waiting for him especially; when he got close enough to plan to perch beside her, he couldn’t find where she’d been sitting. Gone again.

When next she did that, winged away, he called after her, “Stop!” She didn’t. He fell onto a branch, defeated, and called again, but not a call, “Please stop.”

And she stopped. She took a perch and stayed. He gathered strength and flew to where she was and took a perch not too near, as quietly as he could.

“Why did you stop?” he asked her, and immediately wished he hadn’t, but she only turned her tender left eye on him (the right, he thought, had some cold cunning in it) and said, “Because you asked, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea.”

He thought she could no more cease to behave as she did than he could cease to follow her—but he only thought this afterward, when he could mock himself for his despair at her willfulness. The way she’d fly off in silence if he said the wrong word. The way she’d dare him to please her: on the lake’s shore she’d say to him, “See if you can fly up and dive under this water.”

“I can’t do that! I’m not a Duck.”

“Oh, well then,” she’d say, and leave him there.

Or she’d say, “The Eagle on the heights has hatched young. Go take the flesh she brings to them and bring some here to me.”

This he actually (it was spring!) wondered if he might try to do. But before he could brace himself for it, she was laughing at him. Mad Crow! Did she even mean the things she said? Could she really not make up her mind about him or was it all just a tease, a game she’d played before? He didn’t any longer know how old he was himself, but he felt she was older than he, knew more about these things, had maybe even had a mate, maybe long ago; but when he questioned her, she only said, “Life’s long, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea.”

At last on a day of warm, stifling wind and mist he was with her on the ground watching her eat—he seemed to have lost his own appetite just for the moment—and another male, big, loud, unkempt, landed between them and began to make gestures toward Kits. No! Dar Oakley went for him without a thought, and the bird laughed and dodged his attacks as though Dar weren’t worthy of a response, and turned toward Kits again—and Kits charged him too, fierce, furious, and ran off the astonished Crow, get away! Dar Oakley joined in, chasing him a long way and feeling himself grow larger as he flew. When the lout was well gone, they descended together, laughing, bill to bill, he delighting in her, she in him.

After that it went on between them as it does and must but as it never had before, for Dar Oakley anyway, so that soon he was no longer single but doubled by the inclusion of Kits in him and he in her, all the time, everywhere; the process or dance of it took no thought at all. They didn’t agree to build a nest, but a nest was started—not in the crotch of the Oak at the edge of the old freehold, where he’d imagined that it would be laid when he was young and single; no, she chose a place more modest and concealed, as his own mother had. They knew how to build it, she maybe because she’d seen it or done it once or twice or many times; he’d never done it but he knew too, and the more they did it, the more they knew how to do it, and the more they knew how to do it, the more they knew what made them do it.

“Don’t bring more of those, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea.”

“No? I thought . . .”

“Just look at it.”

“Oh.”

“This. This is good. Bring more of this.”

“It’s all I found.”

“Go find more.”

“Kits!” he said. Without thinking he took her black bill in his to make her stop. All in a moment they were fighting, then not fighting.

That was the what, and he knew it. It was sure to come, yet couldn’t have been imagined before it came. Huge as it was, it lasted only a moment, a moment’s contact and a spasm, but Dar Oakley was as stunned by it as if he really had dived under water, or been thrown right up into the sun. One bird. Right away they began again, but less certainly; abashed, maybe, by the power of it. He moved clumsily to cover her and this time she flew from him, or from it.

Dar Oakley open-billed, wings spread low, ashamed and angry.

Soon enough, though—on the nest’s edge, on the ground below it, then even in the air around about—they came to recognize its coming on, came to expect it, to earn it together, to gain it, or fail to. Succeeding often enough (as his mother’s Servitor once said) that they knew the forming chicks in all the green eggs she’d lay were his and hers alone. Whereupon it—the what—began to turn from sudden and hot to steady and warm, so that in the greening days Dar Oakley was able to ponder it, how he’d become double, and what he’d now have to do and bear. And he could bear it too. Like any Crow.

Here we go again, his mother’d said. He laughed to think of that.

“What?” Kits on her eggs inquired, bored and fretful, hardly visible above the nest’s edge.

“Nothing,” Dar Oakley said. “Nothing at all.” He hadn’t visited the old freehold, hadn’t seen his mother in many seasons. Did she still live? It wasn’t a Crow thing to wonder about. She, like him and like Kits, had surely known that first time with Father, and perhaps could have told her son about it. Perhaps did tell him. He thought then of the time he had been with Fox Cap and the Singer on the high ledge and the Singer had talked of the bond between the living and the dead, the dead from whom the living learned to live, even as those dead had learned from others who lived and died before them. Crow never dies, he’d said.

“What will become of them?” Dar Oakley asked of no one. “How will they do?”

“What I wonder is,” Kits said, mocking just a little, “what their names will turn out to be.”

It was high summer when at last the preparations had been made and the People went out from their settlement toward the place from which they had come, to take back their dead who remained there.

The old and the very young were left behind to mind the herds, drive the flocks to the summer grasslands, keep the fires going, and gather from the fields. The others went out the gates of the palisade, carrying food to eat on the way, and pots to cook it in; they drove Sheep and Goats for food and milk, and also for gifts—one big male walking with a kid across his shoulders. The warriors went first, with their weapons and the strong pelts they wore studded with iron to stop a weapon, and caps the same. Carts carried the Biggers, one propping up a sword so large that no one could ever wield it in a fight—Kits said that it surely wasn’t intended to be put to use, so it was only to stand for the strength and force of the Lake People. So many things they did and made and carried only to stand for other things; the trouble they took about it.

“We too,” Kits said. “To them we are what we stand for. We Crows.”

“Death-birds,” Dar Oakley said.

They went out with a huge noise from their drums and from their horns (the Crows’ vocabulary of People words grew every day) that were shaped like Snakes, the tail in the blower’s mouth, the Snake’s long body rising up, its mouth open wide from which the sounds came.

“But Snakes make no sound,” Kits said.

Some People blew into the hollowed horns of Rams.

“At least Rams make noises,” Kits said.

“Not like that,” Dar Oakley said. The Crows of this region had never known of Rams before People came, but now they did.

In the trees around them, from which they observed the People passing, Kits’s fledglings perched, all strong, all flying now: the four that had hatched. They flitted, changed places, pecked at wood, waited to be told where next to go for food, called in the pleading tones of nestlings as often as they called like grown-ups. Their names were . . . Dar Oakley has forgotten their names.

After the bellowers and hooters came Fox Cap, standing in a cart, shaken and distracted. Dar Oakley took a higher perch to see. A few young Crows without anything better to do were following the crowd at a distance.

“Is that One?” Kits asked—using the word for a being whose sex isn’t known.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to follow One?” Kits said.

“I can’t,” Dar Oakley said. “The young.”

“They’re almost grown.”

“Their eyes are still blue,” Dar Oakley said. “They don’t know when the Toads migrate; they can’t tell a Fox from an Otter.”

“You want to go. Go.”

“You come too.”

“I can’t come. The young ones need me.”

Dar Oakley flitted, uneaseful, pointing his bill earthwise, skywise. The People’s noise diminished.

“If you don’t go,” Kits said, “we won’t know what happened, will we? And why, and what for, and all that.”

She said it as though she’d heard those words from him, not once before but many times, and as though that was endearing but annoying, too. He felt it as a challenge, but not one that could be met, and he didn’t try. With the feeling of tearing a primary from a wing, he left her and the young. Kits called the call Watch out after him like a sharp dag from her black bill.

He flew till he reached where Fox Cap was, and went out above her, banking and turning gracefully in the air. Kits was right: he stood for something as much as he was something, a Crow; it was what he had to give to the People for what the Crows had got. When the line of them passed under trees, he went to join a few other laughing Crows there who’d also gone off on this adventure; then he took a perch right on the cart’s rails, clinging as it rolled, to show he wasn’t afraid—though the younger Crows would do no such bold thing. After a time Fox Cap tired of the jolting and climbed out and went walking on, marking her steps with a long staff.

Before the summer sun was down, those in the lead called a halt, and made fires. The fires would signal to those far behind on the path: Here we are. Warriors on a raid would never light fires, Fox Cap told Dar Oakley, but she wanted the ones in the old settlement to know they weren’t coming in darkness for war or to steal things. And on the third day they saw riders on a rise far off daywise, who watched them for a time and then faded away: scouts, come to see and to report.

On the fifth day they came in sight of their old settlement. Keening and cries of mourning arose from the old ones among the walkers to see it. There was a squat tower on a hill above the dwellings, which Dar Oakley took at first for the stump of an enormous fallen tree. A palisade taller than the Lake People’s, many of the posts holding skulls, dead enemies now made into sentinels. Smoke of many fires. Dar Oakley could see—though the People couldn’t yet—that the People who lived outside the walls were driving their animals toward the gates of the palisade, and hurrying inside.

“This was ours,” Fox Cap said to Dar Oakley, though no one else knew whom she spoke to—she was known to speak often with unseen ones. “It’s greater now, the old ones say. Those are strong ones who live there, who pushed us out. Stronger than us.”

“But you drove them away in the battles. Killed many of them.”

“Because they came where we made new homes. It’s our ground.”

Dar Oakley thought Crows would understand that. He wondered if the skulls on the palisade might have belonged to Fox Cap’s People.

Horns and drums. Out from the gate came mounted People. Fox Cap raised her hand to stop the Lake People from going farther, and when they were all gathered there on the edge of the planted land, she set out alone with her staff to meet the warriors coming toward her. The Crows who had followed the People went to the trees, calling to one another in anticipation.

But there was no fighting. Dar Oakley wished he could tell the restive People what he could see and they couldn’t, that Fox Cap had gone down through the fields and the grasses until the riders could see her, and then sat down on the ground there and crossed her legs like a child, the child she had long ago been, and waited for the riders. Her tall staff showed them the place. They came around her. Dar Oakley was afraid to get too near them, but he could hear the jingle of their iron. And she began to speak to them.

Near sunset the riders went away. Fox Cap went on sitting. The Crows called to one another; they went to find food while there was light, and a roost for the night. The People brought food to Fox Cap, and a mantle to keep her warm.

That was the first meeting. Through the next day they all waited. Fox Cap’s staff, standing alone in the field, made Dar Oakley think of the sticks that the first two People he had ever seen had planted in the earth above the lake. The sun was low when the riders came again, with a Bigger among them (it was easy to tell), and a cart that bore a child in wrappings of green, who carried a freshly broken branch of Oak. The People couldn’t see that, but Dar Oakley could; and he could see Fox Cap’s eyes turn from the child and the riders up to where Dar Oakley perched in the trees. He saw her sly smile, as though she were playing a game here.

There was more talk, and then Fox Cap was lifted into the cart with the boy in green, and they all went toward the settlement and the palisade, and disappeared inside.

That was the second meeting.

By then the Crows of that region had got wind of these invader Crows, and gathered to drive them away from their demesne, their groves and hunting grounds. Get, get! Greatly outnumbered, Dar Oakley’s band retreated, and turned homeward. So the only fighting that day was among the Crows. Dar Oakley’s gang heard no more of what happened at the old settlement until the People came home.

When they did, they came bearing their old dead. They had got what they wanted.

The Lake People who had stayed behind in the settlement came out, and some went far along the track to hail the returning ones and their burdens. Crows came too, as was right—Dar Oakley told them—and flew above, calling. First came their banners thrashing in a rising wind, then the warriors and strong ones carrying pots and improvised carriers, bones gray and brown heaped on them with care, some wrapped in bright cloths. Other bones wrapped in the cloth of their own blackened skin. Old female weeping as she walked, carrying a child’s relics. Earth-stained skulls darker than their teeth, carried in the carts that before had carried the Biggers, now honoring these. No horns, no drums: they walked in silence. There was Fox Cap, and with her the boy dressed in green, holding her hand.

“What do they want with bones?” Cuckoo’s Egg said, looking down. “I thought they thought the dead People go off to live somewhere else, and leave this refuse behind.”

“No, no,” said Two Mates. “You don’t get it. They think the bones and what’s stuck to them are alive, and can feel the honor. I’m sure I heard that.”

“You’re both right,” Kits said. “Don’t ask me how.”

“They’re that and not.”

“They’re here and there.”

“They’re where those alive can’t go.”

“And don’t want to go.”

They laughed loud, the three Crows.

The world would be changed by what Fox Cap had done. She’d won back the dead; they’d now be put with songs and keening and the aromatic smoke of fires into the upside-down houses to rest there forever. She’d done it by yielding to the greater strength of those who’d seized the old settlement, by offering that her People would be the lesser of the two, if only they could have these remains, to lie here where People they had known, or their descendants, now lived. For that the Lake People would give the new possessors of their old home place honor and deference, not raid their cattle or burn their crops as they had done before, but pay tribute instead.

“So there will be no more battles now?” Dar Oakley asked her.

“Oh there will be. Not with those, maybe. There are greater ones coming from far off, stronger even than those ones. That boy knows it.”

“But all of you together, you’ll be strong. Who could push you out?”

She held up a hand toward where the sun was rising over the lake. It made him think of the Singer, raising his hand: as though it could by itself draw from the world the thing he held it out to. “They aren’t our kind,” she said, “and they’ll come from where we have never been. Their fighters are many, many more than all our fighters, and they will kill all our fighters. There’s no way to stop them, not for long. It may be many seasons before they come, but they’ll come.” She smiled at her old friend. “You’ll be well fed, Crow.”

She turned away then, looking out over the water, but not as though she sought something. Dar Oakley waited.

“There is a cauldron,” she said at last, not to him. “It can be set on the boil, and slain fighters can be put in, who come out alive and well, all their cut-off limbs put on them again.”

“What,” Dar Oakley asked, “is a cauldron?”

“It lies over the sea,” she said, “and we can’t have it.”

“What is the sea?”

“I don’t know.”

The People had been a long time at work in their old home place, digging up their dead: now winter was near.

“Better than a cauldron,” she said, “is a thing such that, if you have it, you would never die at all. Not ever.”

“What sort of a thing would do that? What would it be?”

She didn’t answer. She rose, restless. He saw that she had a piece of an Oak branch: the one the boy had carried, he guessed. “They know where it is,” she said. “The ones we brought home. When we gathered them from where their bones and flesh had been cast—in the fields, left in the forests, in the roadways underfoot—it woke them, and they were grateful. In the night while we rested on the way, they talked about it. I heard them.”

“About this thing.”

“A precious thing,” she said. “The most precious thing.”

Dar Oakley felt a strange tug at his mind and heart. What she said made no sense to him, not here. But he felt that if she kept talking he would soon be here no longer, but where she was, in Ymr.

“It’s a long way to go to find it,” she said. “Or short. Short and hard. It lies far to the North, I think. We’ll have to find the right path, and keep to it. We’ll go neither to the right hand nor the left. Unless the right way is wrong.”

It was how People lived in the world: for them the world was made of paths, and turns in those paths; the past was where the path had led them from, the future was where it went on to. The turns and forks of paths were where their lives were lived, and were named for their two hands.

“We?” he said.

“Come winter,” she said. “That night, the night when the light side of the year changes to the dark. That’s when there’s a path that opens for us.”

“But I don’t want this thing,” Dar Oakley said. “It’s not for me. Is it? Not for Crows.”

“No. I guess not.”

Dar Oakley thought of his own precious things, which once he had shown her, in the rocks beneath the thornbush. “Why should I go? Why do you want me to?”

She pulled tighter her mantle, but didn’t cease shivering. They were naked as hatchlings their whole lives, People were, without pelt or plumage, and it left them in harm’s way in the dark side of the year. You could fear for them then, if you cared to think about it.

“Because,” she said, “I’m afraid.”

Nothing was stranger to Crows than this: how People thought that only by their own actions would the seasons be made to turn, the days grow warm after winter and the green things grow up that they planted. They thought the sun was a person like them, and did what it pleased; on the longest of winter nights, they must fire a great pile of dry brush on a hilltop to cause the sun to wake and rise rather than remaining below the daywise edge of the world. The Crows knew the world had no edge, because they flew, and could see the steady arising of it up from the far-off, tree by hill, and then beneath them and away—but the People didn’t know it and wouldn’t have believed the Crows if the Crows had told them.

But People knew the day on which the season of the long sun changed into the season of the short sun; they knew when the moon would brighten and when it would darken, and for how long: and about those things they were never wrong.

“I have a journey to take,” Dar Oakley said to Kits. “I don’t know how long. I’m sure I’ll return.”

“You might or you might not,” said Kits.

The winter roost was thickening at evening with Crows young and old. The noise was terrific. Somewhere in the black moving mass were Dar Oakley and Kits’s young, full-grown now.

“When I do return,” Dar Oakley said, “maybe—I don’t know, but it might be that many seasons will have passed.”

“Oh?” Kits said, not as puzzled as Dar Oakley thought she would be. Maybe she hadn’t understood him. He hardly understood himself. “And where are you going, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea? And can I not come with you, I and others? Not good to be alone.”

Kits’s teasing eye was on him. How could he say, Because the place I go to may not exist—may not exist even if I go there? “I’m going with one of the People,” he said. “The one called With the Fox Cap, far billwise, in search of something.”

“What something?”

“She wants my company. I don’t know why.”

“What something?”

“Something precious, that People need or want.” He spoke softly, so as not to be heard amid the jabber. “It’s to keep People from ever dying. They say.”

Crows are never still, if they aren’t asleep, or cold in deep winter: but Kits was still then.

“If you’re gone long enough,” she said at last, “I might be here when you come back, and I might not.”

“I know.”

“Lots of reasons.”

“I know,” he said. It was a plain fact, but it seemed suddenly dreadful. “Maybe you can come. Would you really?”

She still regarded him, though she seemed, he couldn’t say why he felt so, to have ceased to see him. “I’ve traveled,” she said.

Which was likely to be all the answer he was to get.

“For life,” he said, a little desperately. “You and I.”

“Life is short, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea,” she said, and turned away, and lifted her great beautiful wings in that slow beat that was like no one else’s, and went away toward where other Crows were calling.

“It belongs to us, this thing,” Fox Cap said to him, stepping along a track invisible to Dar Oakley, marking her steps with her long staff as though it led and she followed. “Not to them.”

“Because they don’t need it,” Dar Oakley said. “They’re already dead.”

“They are more than dead, these ones,” she said. Her eyes were straight ahead. He rode her shoulder; her mantle was stained with his droppings. They went always billwise, North, which he always knew, and he could point her that way: to the sea, though neither of them knew that. “They were great and brave, and when they lived they had lives far longer than ours, and they’ve been so long beyond life that they’ve grown out of being dead, and have a new life. It may be they never died at all.”

“They aren’t dead?”

“They live. Not lives like our lives. You’ll see.”

He rode on a ways in silence, gripping her rolling shoulder, thinking that she really did mean to go where she had said she would: as though it were not hard but easy. “They are the ones who stole your cap long ago,” he said.

“Not those ones. Those you could put your hand right through; if they came forth at night, they melted away at cockcrow. These are living.”

“What do they live on?”

“Fear and homage.”

Darkness came down, and thus a new day began—because the days of Fox Cap’s People, unlike ours or Crows’, began at sunset. They had set out on the first day of winter, the day the year turned to the dark side. Now the moon had grown, and would go on growing till the night when it was round, and the dark half of the month began. In the blanket looped over her right arm were meat and bread; on the staff she carried, the days till full moon were marked with cuts, and could be counted off. She didn’t know how far in the North was the place they went to, and she wanted to keep on walking on this bright night. Dar Oakley wouldn’t.

“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t fly at night.”

“You can ride,” she said. “And there’s light.”

“It’s not the right kind.”

She laughed, but she soon stopped for his sake, without saying so. He slept, head on his breast, feet locked around a branch. When his eyes opened, he could make her out in the pale placeless light, folded up on a broad rock in the open, awake, fearless. Because of him? He couldn’t think so.

On the last day of the waxing moon they came to the North. She said that was where they were, though he didn’t know how she knew. To him North wasn’t a place but a way you went. They were at the edge of a leafless forest, above a plain. It was shadowless noon. Far off, almost farther than Dar Oakley could see, there was a strange white glitter of light: it was the sea.

A long, high mound crossed the plain, seeming to have been laid down on the earth rather than grown up out of it. In fact it looked—Fox Cap said—like a great sleeping body, stretched out on its side, head on its arm. Dar Oakley couldn’t feature that. They could see dwellings strung out along its base, brown tops and whitened walls. And sheep, browsing where Fox Cap said she saw the body’s grassy knees drawn up; a dog barked, clear in the noontide.

“It’s a barrow,” she said, “where great fighters lie down deep. Think how long they’ve been within it.” She pulled her wind-tugged mantle around her. “It’s so worn away. It could be anywhere.”

Dar Oakley thought it probably was anywhere, but he felt also that he wanted to go no farther toward it. She told him to stay while she went down to those dwellings and asked for a guide to take her up where she had to go. They would know, she told him; many had come here, she said, as they two had.

She set off. Dar Oakley watched her go, then went to find something to eat. By day’s end he had swallowed several fat green caterpillars extracted with care from a prickly bush; the remains of a Red Squirrel left perhaps by a Hawk but containing still a few bits of worth; something he didn’t recognize but that on inspection turned out to be tasty; undigested meat he dug from the scat of a Wolf, or more than one, dropped days ago along a Wolf-way. From time to time he went out toward the hill to see if Fox Cap had appeared, and late in the day there she was, following an old man and a boy upward along a track Dar Oakley hadn’t perceived. He flew high over their heads, and Fox Cap pointed upward to him, and the other two paused to look up; then they went on.

Where they led her to was a depression in the center of a rise toward the daywise end of the barrow. Stones had been set around the edge of this depression. They left her with a small basket of food and went away quickly.

Dar Oakley settled beside her there. Darkwise the sun was red behind breaking clouds. Billwise, a gray shower of rain went off toward the sea: the night would be clear.

“This night,” she said. “We’ll go.”

“How?” he said, looking around at the bareness. “Where?”

“Down,” she said. “By way of a story.” She laid her staff down beside her, and drew her mantle around her. The clearing wind over the barrow was sharp, even in the hollow where they sheltered. “It will take all night to tell it,” she said. “You have to listen to it all, every word, all the way to the end. Otherwise it will do us no good at all.”

Dar Oakley said nothing. Stories were the way People lived. Like paths, they could be traveled in any direction, yet always ran from beginning to end.

“If you listen all the way through, and don’t interrupt with silly questions or fall asleep, it’ll do.”

She waited, watching him.

“No questions,” Dar Oakley said. “All right.”

She waited.

“No sleeping,” he said, doubtful but brave—at least he hoped she thought so.

She turned toward the daywise sky, already dark, yet with a bar of glow above the farther hills. Dar Oakley realized in a sudden panic that he had just agreed to spend the night on the ground, a thing he hadn’t done since he was a lost nestling hiding under a bush.

She began to speak. Sometimes her voice rose as though she called softly to someone not present but nearby: that was singing. Sometimes she laughed and struck her knee, and because she laughed, Dar Oakley laughed too. Only after she had been telling the story for a long time did he realize that all the things told of in it had happened long ago, so long he couldn’t compute it in seasons, or in Crow lives. There was a king, she would say. There was a fool. There was a castle. What is a castle? What is a fool? He couldn’t ask. The moon—it was the glow they saw daywise—began to rise, cold-hot and orange. The story went on: fathers and lost daughters, sons who without knowing it mated with sisters or with beings that weren’t People, unwise promises made and kept or broken, swords and cups and crowns and things he couldn’t picture. He felt his eye-haws draw over, and his eyelids fall. He flitted to wake himself. And then, Fox Cap would say. And then. All that time the moon went on rising, first full moon of the winter. It seemed to grow closer as it rose, as though to hear the tale too.

Dar Oakley began to feel that the depression of earth ringed with stones where they sat had grown deeper. But he couldn’t trust his eyes in this light. Fox Cap before him was all gray and featureless except for the glitter of water in her eye if she looked toward the moon. She kept storytelling: Dar Oakley heard about People who lived a hundred lives or who never died, People who had only one eye and one leg apiece but who bested others in battle, singers and songs that caused warriors to lay down their weapons and weep like infants in shame. A woman who was three women, one of them being a Crow as large as a mountain. And always a precious thing lost and found and lost again.

They were definitely sinking, he and Fox Cap.

The moon was high now and cold and pale, and Dar Oakley didn’t know if he was sleeping or awake. The white stones that ringed the edge of the deepening pit were bright in the colorless moonlight. And as Fox Cap went on speaking, weary and nodding and yet never quite falling silent, Dar Oakley knew himself to be standing on, yes, a great body, the body of a person. The hollow where he and Fox Cap were was its wide-open mouth. Those white stone teeth were about to close on them, and they would go down its gullet into the unimaginable innards.

Why didn’t he up and fly away then, while he still could?

He told me it was because he couldn’t see to fly in the darkness of that white light. But I said, It was because you had to know how the story ended.

It was a great Beech-wood they walked in, the tall, thick gray trees all alike and no other trees intruding there. On the ground no mast, only their yellow leaves, falling singly, each one making a faint click as it joined the others on the ground. There was no other sound, no other beasts, no beings but Fox Cap and Dar Oakley, and when Fox Cap spoke, the trees seemed to wake, startled to hear her.

“If you could read, you could read a story made on the bark of these,” she said. “That’s what the green boy told me. He can read, but not me.”

Dar Oakley thought he had had plenty of story and didn’t know how one could be got out of a tree. What he wondered was why these trees shed no nuts.

“Because they never die,” Fox Cap said, “and they want no more of themselves.”

The Beeches seemed to assent to that. Dar Oakley and Fox Cap went on, and though they couldn’t see any path, it seemed the Beeches were gesturing a way for them to go—and now, far off, was the glow of what was surely a People fire, crimson in the gray.

“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. When he and Fox Cap came closer, they could see that someone sat by the fire as though to warm himself, though it was neither cold nor hot in this place. The one who sat by it never looked up as Fox Cap and the Crow on her shoulder approached him, though he seemed to know by the rustle of the dry leaves that someone was near. Fox Cap came before him, and studied his old immobile face, his eyes white as though a haw like a Crow’s had been drawn over them. Fox Cap knelt before him and put her hands on his old ones, which lay like dry husks on his knees.

Father, she said to him.

Dar Oakley knew what she’d said, though he heard no sound. In her face was something that one day he would call Pity, though he didn’t recognize it then in People, nor in himself.

Father, she said again. I’ve come from other lands. I ask for passage out of this wood. I have a long way to go.

The blind man considered this, or didn’t—he made no sign. But after a time he put out his narrow claw, palm up, asking for something (that was clear enough) to be put in it. Fox Cap searched within her clothes, finding nothing but a tiny metal cup, a thing Dar Oakley had never seen. She put it on the old beggar’s outstretched hand. He felt it there, and with the fingers of his other hand he gently examined it; he smiled, as though he’d found it to be what he’d expected to get, and tucked it away.

Father, Fox Cap said softly. May I pass here? Tell me.

Effortfully the old man’s mouth opened, as though it hadn’t done so in a long time.

Daughter, he said.

Like a breath out of a cave, or the hiss of a wavelet withdrawing down pebbled shingle. Dar Oakley barely heard it. Fox Cap’s eyes hadn’t left the old man’s gray face, but now they shone or glittered in a way Dar Oakley’d seen before and not understood.

Daughter, the man said again. Why have you come here? What are you in search of?

A thing, Fox Cap said, by which I may not ever die. Nor my kind.

No need, the beggar said. You have a Crow.

Dar Oakley, startled to hear himself spoken of, nearly lost his place on Fox Cap’s shoulder.

You have a Crow, the old one said. Crow never dies.

Not so, Dar Oakley said. Why, I . . .

But the old man had raised his hand as though to call silence, or perhaps to speak to many listeners, it was hard to tell.

It’s not a thing you ought to seek, he said. But as I love you, I will give you passage. It’s for you alone.

He put his hand inside his rags, and brought out the same little cup or cap that Fox Cap had given to him.

There, he said, and he put it in her hand as she had put it in his. That’ll do.

She studied the little thing as though she’d never seen it before. Then she nodded to the blind man with slow reverence, and though he surely couldn’t see her, he nodded to her, too. Then he lifted a skinny finger and touched her darkwise eye.

She stood, turned away from the fire, shook her head, smiling, and set out the same way she’d been going, Dar Oakley hopping after her. Their way out of the Beech-wood was clear now. For you alone the man at the fire had said, but Dar Oakley was here too, and he wasn’t going back. He didn’t mind walking along beside her; Crows after all walk for hours every day, searching for things to eat. Out of habit he looked around for such here, though there was none.

“Was that your father?” he asked Fox Cap.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“What is that thing you gave him, that he gave you?”

“A thing,” she said. She showed him: she’d put it on the tip of her longest finger, where it fit perfectly, made to go there. “It’s good that I had it, I guess.” He could see that her darkwise eye, the one the old one’s finger had touched, was no longer green as the other was but blue, the blue of lake water under dawn sun.

She held out her hand to him to mount, and turned to the way ahead, which even as she looked grew suddenly wider; it now led downward into a broad land, green and yellow, a foaming river rushing through it. Great stony mountains rose up on either side, clad in black firs; a sun setting or rising; a wind. Far off, a tower.

“The Happy Valley,” Fox Cap said, and laughed.

“Where are all the ones we saw before?” Dar Oakley asked, suddenly remembering that mob of silent beings, their pale faces looking back at him as they hustled Fox Cap away. “And where are all the ones you found and dug out of the earth and then put in again in their new places?”

“They’re in the North.”

“This is the North. You said.”

But Fox Cap told him how within the Great North there was also a north and a south to go endlessly in, and within that north also a north and a south, and the dead lay in all of them waiting. How could those places be within and yet not be smaller? To Dar Oakley within could only mean little: within an egg, within a grove, within a nut.

“It’s upside down here,” Fox Cap said. “Day’s night. Dark’s light. Left’s right. There are five directions: North, South, East, West, and Here. Here is the one that measures all the rest. It’s where you are and where you may be next. That’s the way we go.”

Dar Oakley had lost his billwise sense, and so he just went with her where she said to go. Wherever she went she seemed to be recognized or remembered, though not the Crow beside her—it was as though no one could quite perceive him there. In huts and byres she was comforted and given food and drink, but couldn’t be understood; in forts and castles she was challenged to games and fights, and promised that if she won, she’d be told what she wanted to know.

In a tower on a hill, a king offered her a bet. He said that if she let him chop off her head, she could chop off his in turn, and he would marry her and give her all that she wanted. Just in time she remembered how this trick went, and when the king’s head was off and hers was still on her shoulders—Dar Oakley can’t recall the way she did it—she held the head up by its long hair.

Now tell me, she said to it. Tell me where the Most Precious Thing can be found. In what land or place, in whose keeping.

No, the king’s head said.

You must. You promised.

Won’t, the king’s head said.

So she made a cup of the king’s skull and drank from it to hear his secret thought, and carried it as she went. The fluid that filled it tasted of iron.

“I know these folk,” she said, walking with a long stride, and confident. “I know the tales.”

“But what if he or anyone tells you the wrong place, and sends you off to where it isn’t?”

“They can’t. They have to tell the truth. In this land there are no lies.”

That might be so, but it didn’t mean they couldn’t speak in riddles or tell the truth in opposites or say one thing and mean another: for though she followed the instructions of the severed head, and the patterns of the game boards, and the songs in tree-language that the singers sang, she came no closer to the Most Precious Thing.

They went North. Dar Oakley walked beside her or rode her shoulder, and in his weariness and boredom he wondered if he had come nowhere at all, if he wasn’t still on the body-shaped hill listening to the tale she told there: as though that tale had been about her all along, about what was to come and not what had once been.

Because of where she had come from—so she told Dar Oakley—she was courted in every land by a king or a beggar or a singer or a fighter, and to every suitor she’d agree to be mated (Oh, all right) but on each wedding night she held her husband off from her with a straight arm and demanded he first tell her plainly where the Most Precious Thing could be found—whereupon he vanished away, or became something different, a moth, a stick of wood, a wave on the water.

“Because they want not to answer me,” she told Dar Oakley. “Cowards.”

The last of those who won her bore her away to a dank pavilion by a golden river, but it was the same—when she questioned him there, he became an Eel and tried to slither away into the mud. Fox Cap caught the Eel before it disappeared and made it speak to her. What kind of thing is it, the Most Precious Thing, where is it, where can it be found?

It’s nothing, the Eel said through its mouthful of teeth.

Tell me the truth, she said.

Very well—it’s everything.

Fox Cap said that one of those things must not be true, but the Eel said, Oh yes they were, both, and would she please let go?

Fox Cap squeezed harder. An Eel is a hard beast to hold on to. She said, Not till you tell where it can be found.

The Eel gasped and squirmed. Nowhere but in a vast land down under, it said, not hidden in the egg of the Crow of this world. Then it wriggled away.

“The Crow of this world?” Dar Oakley asked her.

“In this world there’s only one,” Fox Cap said, as though she now knew it to be so. “There’s only one of anything. It’s only come upon again and again, and seems to be many.”

“I see,” Dar Oakley said, but really he only sees this now, when he tells about it himself: that in a land where signs are the only things, you needed only one of each, one castle, king, lover, rival, child, animal, fish, bird, tooth, eye, cup, bed. They were nothing but what they meant, and it was what they meant that changed. That was why he could eat the livers of giant fallen fighters one after another in land after land here and not be nourished, never be full and never empty. Every cup Fox Cap drank from was as full after she drained it as before, and her thirst never grew more or less. It was that land. They stood on its far hills, watching the sly sun go down.

As on every night now he was faced with a choice, to sleep unsteadily squatting on the ground like a Quail in the shelter of Fox Cap’s mantle, or to go alone to the grove of Hazel (there was always a grove of Hazel) and listen nightlong to the leaves whispering to one another about him. Fox Cap never seemed to sleep at all.

“Why do they want to keep this thing from you, if they don’t need it themselves?” Dar Oakley asked. “I just don’t understand.” All these questions he had been forbidden to ask on the barrow’s top in the moonlight, but he would ask them now, or be no help at all to her.

“This is what the Singer told me,” Fox Cap said. “If this thing were ours, and the living never died, then no more kings and queens and cowherds and fighters would come down to this land. Their number would never grow. They would lose the homage and the gifts they get. Who’d care to remember them? Finally they’d be forgotten.”

The sun seemed to have gone down as far as it wished to and had begun climbing back up, its red face cooling as it rose.

“It’s why they steal babies,” Fox Cap said. “Why the ones in the tangled forest tricked me to follow them, and wanted me never to leave. You remember. They wish us to be with them: ever more of us.”

“Well, one day you will be.”

“Maybe not,” Fox Cap said, and laid her staff alongside her where she sat. “Maybe not.”

“But why,” Dar Oakley said, “if it’s better here—fighting and feasting all the time, no one has to dig the dirt, the killed ones up and drinking and eating, ever and ever . . .”

“It’s not better here,” Fox Cap said with cold certainty. “They say it is, but not even heroes want to come here till they must, and when they must, they weep. It’s not better. That’s why we mourn for the dead, Crow: not only for our loss but for theirs.”

The sun was high.

“Let’s go on,” Fox Cap said.

There was no way to a vast land down under that Fox Cap could find. Dar Oakley was ashamed to have been so little help to her, as little as if he had been only listening to her tell the tale of what she did and suffered. No help at all: not until they had lost all hope, and turned from the North at last.

“I’m old,” Dar Oakley said. “I give up.”

“We’re both old,” said Fox Cap, leaning on her staff. Her back was bent. “Old as old.”

They walked again in the great gray Beech-wood, where the yellow leaves fell with a soft click one by one, and there was no other sound.

“Well, that’s peculiar,” Dar Oakley said. “That wasn’t here before.”

“We were never here before,” Fox Cap said. “Nowhere here ever before.”

“Look,” he said.

In the middle of the forest was a tree taller than any other. It was the middle of the forest only because it was so tall and there was no other like it: its singleness made the woods extend from it lone and level in all directions. Its smooth trunk, with never a branch on it, rose up to and then through the dense crowns of the smaller trees, and its top couldn’t be seen.

“I wonder,” Dar Oakley said.

He lifted his wings, made the downstroke as his aching legs pushed him aloft. He heard Fox Cap behind call to him. He got above the lesser trees and still the one tree rose up, not yet branching, and Dar Oakley thought he hadn’t the strength to reach the top—but then from out of the cloudy fog the lowest branches of the Beech at last appeared, as large themselves as full-grown trees. But what rested there, supported by them as by a hand and fingers outstretched? It was like the surfaces that People would lay in their houses over the bare dirt: a floor. He was under it. He stopped at a great branch, feet skidding on the smooth beech bark, and grew ever more certain what, or where, he had come to. Far, far down at the tree’s base he saw Fox Cap and heard faintly her call, but it was no use to answer her; she’d never be able to climb this tree to reach him.

There were gaps in the floor whose underside he looked up at, where the tree’s thickest arms or fingers went through. As soon as he could trust his wings, Dar Oakley arose again, and by arrowing through a gap he came out into the land above.

For it was a land.

That double-speaking black Eel had said, In a vast land far down under. By which words he’d named a tiny land high up.

In the mist beneath the shadow of the Beech’s immense crown lay the land’s little hills and woods, dwellings from which smoke arose. Dar Oakley glided over them, feeling enormous. There was one dwelling larger than the others, a palisade around it, and within the palisade a little black Dog and a fat black Pig. The Pig slept; the Dog looked up at Dar Oakley and seemed to know him, hate him too. The Crow didn’t care. He descended over the dwelling, and without a wing beat alighted on the reeds and thatch of the roof. No smoke came from the smoke-hole, and Dar Oakley climbed up and looked down in. There was the Crow of this world, sweeping her floor with a twiggy broom.

It was as though he’d done all this before, how he knew who this was, that this was the form she would take: it cost him not even a moment’s thought. And there on the ledge that ran around her house was a basket full of straw, and in the straw was laid a large green brown-speckled egg, a Crow’s egg.

The Crow of this world now seemed to suspect something was amiss, or at least was new, of which there had been none such in aeons. She leaned her broom against the wall, went around the cold fire pit to the ledge where the egg was; she bent over it tenderly, tapped it with her black fingers, and put her ear to it, as though to know if it spoke or made a sound. She looked up sharply then with one eye, but before she saw him, Dar Oakley had flown.

He banked sharply this way and that down over the yard, the palisade and walls tilting in his sight, and landed square on the back of the black Pig. With his strong bill he bit down hard on the Pig’s long, veiny ear—the Pig awoke and squealed in rage. The little black Dog raced around the house at that and charged at Dar Oakley, barking fiercely in an unbroken string of curses, eyes red as coals. But Dar Oakley, spitting pig-bristles, was gone again up to the housetop just as the Crow of this world rushed out the door, broom in hand, to see what was the matter, who’d intruded.

Dar Oakley dropped down into the house.

The egg was bigger than any he’d ever seen a Crow lay, bigger than any egg he’d ever broken with a mad mother on the attack. But the green speckled shell gave way at his first dag, and fell gently in two. He heard a queer moan. There was nothing at all inside.

He thought of the Eel: It’s nothing. He thrust his bill within the empty shell, and took hold of it, of nothing. Nothing took hold of him, resistant and refusing. Dar Oakley had the sensation of a squirming, thrashing thing, though looking down along his bill as best he could, he saw only nothing.

Holding tight to it, he rose up to the smoke-hole. He heard below him a sound, a screaming such as he had never heard any being make even in death, and as he fled out the hole and away from the house, he knew he was pursued. A blackness only, but flapping, snapping, like a People’s banner in a sharp wind. He couldn’t look back, wouldn’t have if he could, but he knew the blackness was close behind him and growing larger as it overtook him, darkening the dull sky. He spied the hole in the land that he had come up through, almost overshot it, fell toward it in a sudden dive, trying to guess how fast he could go and have any chance of not breaking his neck on the lip of it (though what would it mean to die here, where all were dead?), and felt, as he went down through, his wing brush the edge—he tumbled as much as flew down and out below.

The blackness didn’t pursue, or couldn’t.

Fox Cap, pale face turned up, waited at the tree’s foot, growing larger as he came down. He wanted to cry out, tell her he had it, he had it, but to cry out in pride would be to let go of it—every Crow child knows how that story goes.

She stared at him in wonderment as he flew around her head, shaking his bill and making a faint meaningless groan from his throat, but she seemed frozen, until he flew nearly into her face with it—and she backed away with a look he couldn’t grasp, horror, doubt, amazement, fear, what was it? Anyway she understood now what he had, and tried to think what to do; she searched herself—for what? This thing he held on to would be off and gone in a moment! She took out the only thing she had: the little metal cup that fit on the tip of her finger.

She held it out to him. He alighted near her, and she knelt and held it close to his bill. He thought her hand trembled. Certainly his bill did; the cup was so small, and how could what he held fit into it? Because it was nothing, that’s why, and could fit anywhere. It slid from his bill as though still desperate to cling there, but in it went. Fox Cap set the tiny cup on a knee of the great Beech, and they both looked in, heads almost touching. The pebbled bottom of the cup could be seen just as before, but there was no doubt that it was in there, the Most Precious Thing; no doubt at all.

“I couldn’t touch it,” she said. She was still trembling. “I can’t.”

“It’s caught,” Dar Oakley said. “It can’t get out of that—that—”

“Thimble,” Fox Cap said, for that’s what it was—Dar Oakley would see many, and steal one or two, in later times. A thimble.

It seemed they had done that which they had come to do. Hadn’t they? Now and then Fox Cap would raise her eyes to Dar Oakley, and now and then Dar Oakley would raise his eyes to her. Her hands rested on the Beech-root, but never took up the thimble.

“I’m so tired,” she said. “So tired.”

Dar Oakley sensed a stirring, far away, so far it was maybe not in any place at all, but a stirring, as though something or many somethings were awaking troubled.

“So tired,” Fox Cap said. She drew away from the Beech and sat, then sank, hands on the forest floor.

“No!” Dar Oakley said. “No, don’t.”

“A little while,” she answered. “It’s done.”

Dar Oakley wanted to speak again, but he could see it would do no good. With weary slowness Fox Cap drew her mantle to her chin and pillowed her head on her arm and drew up her knees—like the man of the barrow, like any of her kind.

Sleep? That’s what they were to do now? It was indeed dark in the Beech-wood, as though the furious Crow of this world had overspread the whole land. Reluctantly he took a stand on the knuckle of a Beech root where it rose to join the trunk—at least it wasn’t the bare ground. He supposed he wouldn’t sleep, and even when he awoke he felt uncertain that he had. How long had he roosted there? It was day again, or still day.

What had waked him?

You, he heard. That was what had waked him, a word.

He looked around. Fox Cap slept. The Beech-wood was as empty as before.

You, said the voice again. Then: Listen.

In growing dread and certainty, Dar Oakley turned his head to where Fox Cap’s thimble had been put. It was clear: nothing had spoken.

Crow, said the voice from within the thimble. Listen to me.

Dar Oakley couldn’t do otherwise. The feathers of his head and neck rose, his ears opened.

Take me away from here, it said. Quick, before she wakes.

Take you where? Dar Oakley said, looking sharply with this eye and then the other at nothing, speaking to nothing, awed by the impossibility. Who are you?

You know who I am. I am who you think I am.

Then you are hers.

No! No. Listen to me. I belong to the one who finds me, you see? That’s you. You found me, not her.

I don’t want you, Dar Oakley whispered—perhaps he made no sound at all, yet he knew he’d been heard. I don’t want you; you can’t do anything for me. For my kind.

Wrong, said the Most Precious Thing. Trust me. A Crow was my mother. My foster mother anyway. She’s lived a thousand years.

Dar Oakley couldn’t respond to that, the little of it he understood. It was absurd, arguing with a thimble. He looked to where Fox Cap lay, thinking he’d wake her now.

No, don’t! said the Most Precious Thing. Take me away. Pick me up quick and put me in your pack.

I don’t have a pack, Dar Oakley said.

No? I thought you would have a pack.

I can’t carry a pack. I’m a Crow.

Never mind! said the Most Precious Thing. Pick me up now and carry me how you can. I’m good for Crows! I promise. It’s your chance! You!

That strange surge of alertness Dar Oakley had heard gathering far off had grown stronger. He thought, Why shouldn’t it be? And why shouldn’t I? Didn’t I bring Crows the flesh of People, the news about battles, all that wealth? This would be the last gift, the best gift. It would pass from Crow to Crow, he didn’t know how, but somehow it would make the whole of his kind glad. He would make them glad; glad forever.

Yes! said the Most Precious Thing from within the thimble. Now you’re thinking right. But quick! She’ll wake!

Dar Oakley’s heart all in a moment grew huge, as in love or at mortal threat. He leapt, grasped the thimble, felt nothing grab hold strongly of his bill.

Now run, said the Most Precious Thing, but Dar Oakley couldn’t perceive a way to run that was better than any other way. He turned to what might be the opposite of billwise, and winged that way. The thimble he carried, the nothing within it, had begun to feel strangely heavy.

While we go, he heard the Most Precious Thing say, I’ll tell you a story. It will pass the time.

Dar Oakley couldn’t object without opening his bill, so he only flew on.

I was not always as I am now, said the Most Precious Thing. Once I was an herb growing at the bottom of the sea. All was peaceful there for eternities. But then there came down through the waters a thing I had never seen before: white as a fish’s belly, with a squinty eye, limbs going all which way. The next thing I knew I had been plucked up out of the eternal mud by the creature’s ugly hand! Imagine my distress. . . .

Dar Oakley longed to tell the thing that he didn’t know what the sea was, and wanted no more stories, but of course he couldn’t open his bill. The thing grew heavier the farther Dar Oakley carried it. With every wing beat its weight pulled him closer to the ground. He labored to rise, his wings feeling numb and powerless. But now he saw that ahead as he went the trees were different, were smaller, were Birches rather than Beeches. That way led home, surely.

So after all it was the Snake that swallowed me, he heard the Most Precious Thing say, as though from far away. So Snake lives forever, not People. A shame.

Lying thing, Dar Oakley thought: it had said Crows live forever. Or was it another who’d said that? He could go no farther. He pulled up and settled on the ground.

No, no! said the Most Precious Thing. Go more! She’s coming!

Whether that meant Fox Cap or the Crow of this world, Dar Oakley didn’t know. He let the thing he held fall from his bill, shaking it off when it tried to hang on.

I can’t, he said. You’re too heavy.

Then hide me. Hide me quick. Where no one but you can find me.

A rushing wind had arisen fast in the windless forest, blowing from behind him. Turning, he saw Fox Cap, far off; the wind tugged at and tossed her mantle, stirred her hair. He thought he could see her face.

What had he done? Oh what?

Hide me from her! said the Most Precious Thing. She’ll steal me from you.

Where?

Here, said the thing.

Dar Oakley was at the foot of a Birch. It had a peculiar twisted root poking from the ground, that made a space where something could be hidden—indeed the tree seemed to display it welcomingly. A place like a place where a Crow might hide a thing, if he could do it without being seen.

You’ll run away, he said to the invisibility.

No, it said. I will stay here in this place under this tree.

You’re lying.

Don’t be silly. I can’t lie.

Dar Oakley cried aloud in awful bafflement, but there was nothing else to do. Scuffling with his feet and bill, he pushed the thimble toward the place, and when he thought it was concealed, he tossed up leaves over it.

Remain with me, it said in a woody, earthy voice—or was that the Birch that spoke? Someone had once told him to trust the Birch, or not to trust it. He dagged sharply at the Birch’s bark, cutting a mark. He hopped back and lifted off, turning to where Fox Cap was coming.

Soon he could see her face clearly, see her mouth form a word: Crow. But he couldn’t hear it. He seemed to make no progress toward her; it was as though he flapped away stone-still in the middle of the air while the trees rushed around him, changing places, and Fox Cap grew ever larger. Behind him he heard a weird commotion, a threshing of leaves and branches.

“Crow!” she cried. “Did you steal it, Crow?”

“No, no,” he called. “No! It ran away. I was chasing it.”

“You lie!” she said. He was too high for her to strike at with her staff, but she tried. “You stole it. I knew you would!”

“No!” Dar Oakley cried. “Don’t say that! I know where it went. I do. I know where it is.”

Fox Cap looked at him in despair. She seemed older than the Beeches.

“I know where it is,” Dar Oakley cried again. How could she not trust him? A Crow would never forget where a thing was cached. “Come, come!”

He turned over in air and flung himself back the way he had come. It wasn’t far. Where the Birches began, where the ground lifted, where a green land and sky could be seen far off.

But there was no such place there ahead. There were Birches in plenty, but all crowded together, almost no room between them to fly through, all regarding him smugly. He went in among them, searching.

“One with a mark,” he cried to Fox Cap. “With a twisted root at the daywise side. This one!”

He settled at its base. The tree wasn’t where it had been, the place he had committed to memory. Was he wrong? Maybe it was not this one but that one there, with a similar twisted root poking from the ground.

The same twisted root.

As though a Hawk’s foot clutched his breast, he saw. Each one of them, every Birch, had a twisted root at its base, a place where something might be hid. Each had a scuffle of leaves thrown up there, to hide something. And each had the mark of a Crow’s beak in its slim shaggy trunk, each mark the same.

Dar Oakley couldn’t see the end of them, rank on rank. He hadn’t been lied to: the thing lay where he’d put it.

“Fubun, Crow!” Fox Cap cried to Dar Oakley. “Fubun for stealing it. Why were you so wicked, why? Fubun!”

The word—he didn’t even know what it meant—felt thrust within him like a locust’s thorn. Fox Cap fell, defeated, at the tree’s foot. Dar Oakley thrashed at the leaves that hid the spot where the Most Precious Thing could be but wasn’t. If they spent a year and a day searching, they wouldn’t have begun. He ceased, and stood by her there where she lay in grief.

Why, why had he done it? How could he have been so foolish? He should never have done what he did. He ought to have seen through that trick, how could he not have? He searched in thought for the right thing he should have done and hadn’t and now never could. A storm of bitter feeling darkened his mind. Dar Oakley, first among all Crows, felt the sting of remorse.

“It’s done,” Fox Cap whispered.

The day that had begun not long before sank away; the trees ceased their agitation, the forest grew still and dead and dark.

When the darkness was utter, a wind of their former world sprang up, a little wind, a real wind, touching them.

Then all the trees went away, and stars could be seen.

Then the hollow in the barrow where they sat became clear, even to Dar Oakley, in the last light of the sinking moon.

Then he and Fox Cap looked down to see the basket that the shepherd and his boy had left for them, with a clay bottle of water and something in a rag of cloth.

The whole of a winter night had passed, but not more than that; the moon had crossed the sky darkwise, and now the sky daywise was lit red by the sun not yet risen. They were where they had been.

For a time they sat and nothing more. Even the Crow was still. As the daylight grew he could see that Fox Cap wasn’t as she’d become in the Other Lands, was no older than when they had set out, if they ever had; pale in the dawn light, but her hair red and full.

“The story’s over,” she said. She looked around her at the hill and the sky and the sun, and laughed, or wept—it was often hard for a Crow to tell. She undid the cloth, which held oatcakes, and broke them and shared them with Dar Oakley, and when they’d eaten she rose, took up her staff, and started down the path. The Crow winged ahead to lead her homeward from the North, the only North of this world.

In later times, in centuries after, when the tales of Dar Oakley were known by Crows in many places, this one of how Dar Oakley nearly brought the Most Precious Thing to the Crows so that they never needed to die would be one of them. It would be said (though it wasn’t so) that the way Crows everywhere find and hide glittering and shiny things in secret places, how they’re always on the lookout for them wherever they go, the way they steal them from the People to have for themselves—all that’s because Dar Oakley lost the Most Precious Thing that he stole and made off with, and Crows ever after have been looking for it.

What would he tell Kits of what he had seen and done? There was no other Crow that he could imagine telling it all to—if she believed him, she’d laugh in delight at his misadventures, and also if she didn’t believe him. But as he made his way back to the lake and the Crow’s demesne and thought of recounting it all to her, she appeared to his inward eye to be far off, not near and listening; unable to hear or understand. He told the tale over to himself as he went, though not as he tells it now perhaps; as he told it then he was perhaps wiser in it, and braver, gave good advice, wasn’t fooled. He doesn’t remember.

He couldn’t find Kits in the winter roost, or among the Crows gathered at good feeding sites. He tried to ask after her, to learn who had seen her that day or the day before—but names were still new among the Crows, and the saying of her name brought no one to mind for most of them. Her children—or were they her children’s children?—could tell Dar Oakley nothing.

She could have been lost anytime, he knew, in the years he had been in the Other Lands—so many things could have happened. But no, he hadn’t been gone long, only so long as it took to reach that man-shaped mountain, and return again.

He saw her everywhere, of course: amid the Crows dismantling the bones of an old Dog whose corpse the People had dragged away from their dwellings; arguing over a dead Salmon by the water; walking the People’s bare fields in search of wintering grubs—none of them were her, none turned her head toward his call.

Well, she was smart and tough, she went her own way. She’d return when she liked—and mock him for fretting about her, for thinking the worst, which often he now did think when winter nights came down, and the noisy roost settled, and the snow was pink in the last light of the short sun. He felt he was without half of himself.

It was worse when spring came.

He knew by then that he would never find her or see her again—for if he could have, he would have: she would have found him. Yet still he believed that she’d appear again, any day, because of how much he needed her to. That was what did the harm, knowing the one, believing the other. He thought it would kill him, that spring, but it didn’t; and when the next spring and the next came, he knew it wouldn’t. It was no longer something terrible happening to him, it had begun rather to be something terrible that once had: and that was bad in a different way, and would never be gone.

In time the one whom only Dar Oakley now called Fox Cap really did grow old, though Dar Oakley didn’t. She took the Singer’s name for her own, not telling anyone what it was, not even Dar Oakley. Her daywise eye stayed as blue as a baby Crow’s, and with it on certain days of the year she could see what others couldn’t: the recent dead, striving to return or remain, unwilling to be gone for good. She never took a mate, no wife or husband, though (as the Singer had done) she drew to herself young ones who were unfamilied, unfriended, and from them she chose one to teach what she knew, the long songs and the knowledge of the tripartite world that Dar Oakley could not absorb. Of herself she could sing, as the Singer had once sung, I am a wave on the water:

I am a tale yet to be told

I am the eye of midsummer

I am the flash of the Trout

The Viper has heard my name

For I am the honey of the Yew

When she had lived a long life, and her settlement had grown great, with many dwellings and herds of animals and even a king in a tall whitewashed castle, with ground glass and mica in the wash to make it glitter in the low sun like the dwellings in the Other Lands, Fox Cap died.

But Dar Oakley did not.

When her death came near, Fox Cap went to a cave high in the stony mountain, where she was visited every day by one or another of the young People she had taken into her care, who brought her water and the food she began at last to refuse. Dar Oakley visited there too, sometimes, when she sat out in the sun on the rocks, as still as one herself, eyes closed but not asleep; though he wouldn’t venture into her dark dwelling.

The last time he came to where she sat, she raised her head and hand to welcome him. He settled by her. She waited for him to speak, for he had come to speak, that was obvious, and yet for a time he only flitted, and raised his head, billwise, darkwise, daywise. At last he said to her what he had never said before: that he was sorry, sorry that he had lost the Most Precious Thing that she had gone in search of, in his unwisdom and greed, and now she had to die.

“It’s all right, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea,” she said. “It’s a thing that can be sought and found, but it’s always lost again. That’s how the stories of it end. Every one. Mine too.”

“And mine,” said the Crow, and hung his head.

“It’s not good to die,” Fox Cap said. “But it’s not good to live forever, either. Grow old enough and you’ll know it.”

Her eyes lost their farseeing gaze at that, and she looked right at him and smiled—for a moment he saw the child Fox Cap that he had known. She seemed to sleep again then, and he ascended away.

The excarnation of Fox Cap was a great event among the Lake People. She was laid on a bier decorated with a hundred fluttering bits of weaving, and tall banners at each corner to draw in the death-birds (who were actually alarmed by flapping things, though they had grown accustomed to these, signals that it was time to come and do their duty). To the keening of the People and the thudding of drums, which the Crows had also to ignore, Fox Cap’s body was bared and opened. The keening turned to a great groan of awe as the black gang came in, gathering on the rocks above as they always did, first to study and converse, no matter how many of them had done this before. Then a few brave birds came down while big ones kept watch, and next others emboldened by them, settling their long feet upon the wealth, disputing, rising away and settling again at her head and breast, hard black bills striking.

After a day Dar Oakley came down too. In the cluster of Crows around the body of her, tugging at her flesh, she seemed to him the person she had been when alive and yet entirely different. He partook as the others did—there was never much to her, and in her last seasons she’d grown as lean as a Deer’s shank—but though he wished to honor her and all that had passed between them, he found he couldn’t yak and quarrel over her fats with any will.

He left them, and flew up to the ledge above, to which on a long-ago day Fox Cap had climbed to call him to carry the Singer to the Other Lands. Why was he unable to do the same for her now?

It was because with her gone he was again always and only in Ka, where there are no other lands, just this one.

But no, that wasn’t it: for in Ka a Crow or any being might eat any dead one; it was the way of things, everyone abided by it, even the dead themselves assented, if only by their patience. The one dead thing—the one palatable dead thing—that a Crow would not eat was another Crow.

If he couldn’t eat his old friend, even for her own sake, then it must be that she had become like a Crow to him. What had made her different from her own kind had finally made her one of his kind. Or perhaps—there were Crows who said so, mocking him—it was he who, in his difference from Crow-kind, had become one of hers.

That was dreadful to think: one of her kind. As though he’d been caught in the sticky stuff that People coated the branches of trees with, to trap small birds that settled on them unaware. Foolish birds, caught as no Crow would ever be.

He lifted himself on wings that had grown heavy. It was those People words he had learned, the speech of hers he had drunk down like nectar: that was what had caused it, and they couldn’t be given back, spat out. He could go far from here, far from the lake and her People, but for him now there was no place in all of Ka where Ymr was not too.

Let them carry her, then, those Crows who didn’t care where she was bound, or to what land. It was as well. She knew the way. It was her own land now, and she would come there honored as a singer, and by her singing be one of those who kept its secrets forever from the living. As for him, it was as true to say there was no land now that was his, no reason to be in one place and not another; no reason not to go someplace else, and no reason to stay.

How far Dar Oakley went from the Lake People’s towns, how long he lived in the places to which he came, he’s unable to tell me. He sank back into Crow time, without history. He ate and yakked with the Crows of that region, who still had no names; he stopped counting the moons, and no one told him the day on which the summer ended and the winter began. Those Crows followed Ravens who followed the Wolves of the high forest and ate what was left of the Elk and the Deer that the Wolves brought down, after the Ravens had had their fill. In time he was a Bigger there and sat on a branch and kept watch, waiting for the smaller and younger ones to eat before he descended: that was what a Bigger did. In winter roosts he took the center of the flock, exchanging talk with others of his status. Mostly they talked about the weather.

He had a mate, and then another; he had young. They grew up, they grew old and died, but not Dar Oakley. As time went on, he’d now and then tell one or another of his stories, unable not to: to his offspring, before they could understand; to a Bigger who might beck in acknowledgment or shake his head in wonder but more likely’d pay no attention; to the trees.

Then on a hot day in early summer, high bare sun suddenly intense, a band of Crows were laid out on a grassy slope in that peculiar state they get into sometimes in the hot sun: spread flat as though killed, unmoving, eyes hooded and bills open, “drugged” we’d say now by heat. Dar Oakley one of them. If you or I had been there, we could almost have picked him up unresisting.

As they lay there, passing the occasional comment about warmth, or sun, or nothing much, a steady sound began to be heard off darkwise from where they lay, a high crashing or jangling, a thudding too that traveled through the ground and into their wings and bodies stretched over it. Most of the sun-stunned Crows paid no attention, but Dar Oakley felt an odd trepidation come over him, and after a time he pulled his scattered limbs together and arose, flying low and then mounting higher, just to see. He knew, he thought he knew, what it might be, what sort of thing. He rose up high enough to see them roll up out of the far daywise.

It was People, yes, as he’d known it had to be, and lots of them, but not a kind of People he’d ever seen. They strode along all together, and the striking of their feet was what shook the ground, so many of them there were; and they were almost covered with metal plates, glossy and blazing in the sun, and high glittering caps, and long shields of metal that it seemed it would take great strength to carry. Ahead of all these stampers came a few on horses, also in shining metal—even their leg-wrappings and skirts seemed made of it. Banners and signs aloft, with birds attached to them, or signs of birds rather: raptors, you could tell that’s what they were meant to be. They were all on the way to battle, certainly, somewhere.

Dar Oakley saw in his mind Fox Cap long ago raising her arm as though to bring forth the battles she saw were to come one day. They aren’t our kind, she’d said to him. They come from where we’ve never been. There will be many of them, and they can’t be stopped.

The ones on horses in the front now pointed up at the Crow flying over, and laughed and spoke to one another. Dar Oakley banked, returning, watching them. Who were they, why did they laugh? He remembered the first People he had ever seen, how they had raised their spears to him. The Bigger of these—his cloak was red, they all looked to him—now called to one of the others near him; that one took from his back an instrument of some kind, drew from a carrier a slim stick, and combined the two. Dar Oakley circled, fascinated. The thing was pointed at him.

He might have evaded the arrow if he’d known he ought to, but it was as when he and another Crow—a parent, a friend, Kits—would toss a stick between them, drop it from a height so the other could catch it, and again. This fast-flying stick struck him under the darkwise wing and pierced the plumage, went through the ribs and ruptured the aorta.

Death is not an event in life, the philosopher says. We can imagine how the commander in red praised the archer, how the legion cheered, how they passed over the Crow body, their horses and shod feet kicking it apart. But Dar Oakley knew none of it. He was dead: dead as dead.