“The battole,” said the Raven.
That was the first Dar Oakley heard that word for the thing, the thing he could think about but not name: a word in Raven speech for the unpronounceable word in the speech of ymr ymr that Fox Cap used. Now it was his.
“The battle,” he said. “Yes.” A streak of lightning. Thunder broke with a sudden, singular noise. Dar Oakley had heard of birds slain in the air by the mere force of a thunderclap, dropping dead from air to earth. “That was good eating,” he said, and eyed the Raven, but whether the Raven agreed, or cared what a Crow thought about that day, was hard to know. “And to see how those People went among the other People their fighters had killed, and hacked and cut and shouted at them. How they wrapped up their own dead and kept us from them.”
The Raven said nothing.
“Strange,” Dar Oakley opined.
“Is gnot,” the Raven said, in so low a mutter that Dar Oakley wasn’t sure he heard it. He waited; just when he believed there would be no more, the Raven spoke again.
“You have gnot lived among them as we have.”
“Oh. Ah,” Dar Oakley said, humbly he hoped.
“For uncounted seasons,” the Raven said in his hoarse Ravenish growl, “in forests far billwise from here, in lands where many of them live. Have seen battoles far greater than that one, as many People as are Crows in winter roost, all fighting and killing. And after, we were not prevented from going among them.”
“Crows, too?”
“I did not perceive that those People could tell difference, Crow or Hraven,” the Raven said, as though this had been the greater wonder.
Dar Oakley thought of it, of People in many places far away, Crows and Ravens alongside them after battles as he and his flock were alongside Fox Cap’s People. Eating the flesh of the carcasses that the People had made. Maybe it was common, but that didn’t make it less strange. It made it more strange.
“I wondered,” he said, “if they really knew that those dead were dead. The way they went on fighting with their dead bodies, or cherishing their own.”
“They gnow,” the Raven said. “I will tell you now, Crow, what we Hravens learned long ago, so that you may understand.”
Dar Oakley thought of saying some grateful word but couldn’t think of one, and said nothing.
“The People,” the Raven said, “believe that dead People are still alive. In their flesh and even in their dry bones.”
“They can’t,” Dar Oakley said. “They can’t believe that.”
“They do. They believe that dead can feel insults and honors. When everything they are is rotted past even Crows’ relishing, and sunken in earth. When living have made holes in earth and cached those bones in them and covered them over again.”
“No.”
“They think those ones are among them still, as they were before. They visit them in places where they died, or they avoid those places, it might be for years, thinking that dead still remain there, angry or vengeful.”
Dar Oakley had hardly understood all this in the Raven’s high speech. “I thought you said, Master, that they put them under the ground and cover them up.”
“They do. Or they burn them to black nothing in fires. No matter. Wherever those dead are, they are Realm: realm of dead People—like realm of living ones. From that realm they issue to reach People who are living.”
“Realm?” It was a name or a word Dar Oakley didn’t know.
“Realm,” the Raven said. “Like realm of Hravens. I suppose even Crows may be realm.”
Dar Oakley didn’t know if the Crows were a realm. A place, was it, where they collected, like a roost? A realm. He swallowed the Ravenish word like a nutmeat, and it was his.
A realm of dead People. Strange birds, he thought, Ravens, to think up such a thing. “Well, I’d like to go there, wherever it is. And see.” He cocked his head, to show it was a joke.
The Raven lifted its broad wings. The rain had passed, and gusts of cold wind searched the evergreens. “If you eat dead Them for long enough, Crow,” the Raven said, “perhaps you will.”
Without farewell, the black bird pushed off and into flight.
When Fox Cap at last came and found Dar Oakley again, she had grown even more—so much more that he wondered for a moment if she was she. But no one else would wear the Fox cap but she, and no one else would speak to him, and listen to him speak.
He was overjoyed. He didn’t know why. They wandered together. She seemed to have gone farther away than the settlement on the lake, to somewhere where things were not the way they were here, as the Vagrant had once claimed to have done; and had seen things there she wouldn’t speak of, or for which she had no words. She was like the answer to a puzzle he hadn’t yet been set—though that wasn’t a thought that the Crow Dar Oakley was then could think.
So happy was he, so wanting to bring her back within his compass, that he took her to see a thing that was his, which he had told no one, no other Crow, about.
“What?”
“You’ll see.”
“Is it far?”
“Close. Very near. Right there.”
She laughed, seeing nothing. All around the grasses bent and gestured in wind. He had taken her to a little rocky outcropping hidden by a thornbush. He looked and listened, making certain no Crows were near. “Here,” he said. He poked his head in beneath the bush where she should look. She got to her knees and peered in under the leaves into a gap in the rocks.
“Mine,” he said.
Perhaps he believed, then when he was young, that no other Crow had ever gathered a treasure as he had done. Of course many do—they’re famous for it—but they never, ever tell where theirs is, or say a word of its existence. Older Crows know very well that their friends and neighbors might harbor precious things, and if a Crow is seen picking up a thing, inedible, useless but intriguing, and carrying it off, that Crow might well be followed; and if she sees herself followed, she might drop that thing as though it’s of no interest to her, rather than reveal where her true things are hidden.
“You can’t have them,” Dar Oakley said.
There was a half of a mussel shell, showing the opalescent inside—he turned it over for her to see. There were some pieces of mica, drab as dry leaves until he lifted them into the sun. Pebbles showing bands of glittering quartz. A fragment of a broken People silver bracelet—she recognized it—and a bit of glass. Dar Oakley doesn’t remember now all the things that were in it; he laughs to think of what they might have been, and what he’d later steal and hide in other times and worlds: some much worse than precious.
“But it’s all,” Fox Cap began to say—all nothing—but she’d grown wiser as well as longer in that cold winter and that harsh spring. She only touched each thing gently, while Dar Oakley looked on in deep anxiety.
Why do they do it, make these collections, visit them in secret to mull over them like misers? Only they know—they, and perhaps other beings who do the same, who also love to keep a hidden pile of glitter.
“All right, all right,” Dar Oakley said sharply, unable to bear the exposure longer. Fox Cap was a threat to secrets, so noisy and obvious—who’d followed her, and spied on them? He decided he’d have to move it all to a new spot next morning.
Fox Cap touched his head, smoothed the feathers there that he couldn’t reach, parting them gently with a fingernail. “I’m glad to see that,” she said.
They went away from there to go around the snares that Fox Cap had set on the moor, and Dar Oakley from above directed her to a little Rabbit caught in one. She showed him how the snare worked, but he knew already: the Crows had found them, and seen the People collect the prizes, mostly too quickly for Crows to profit. She opened this Rabbit with a knife and put its innards before him: her thanks for his gift.