“Tell me,” Dar Oakley said, when his bill wasn’t full. “What is a ‘realm’? Do you have a word for that?”
“How can I know what a word in your speech means?” she said. Her sharp knees poked up atop her long forelegs where she sat in the grass. She wasn’t yet full-fledged, he thought, or however the People would say it. It took them so long, not just a season but year upon year.
“A Raven said that word to me,” he said. “It’s not a word of mine or ours. This Raven said that the Ravens are a realm, and People are too; it’s not just a place where they are, or it’s not only that. You can be there but not go there, it seems.”
Fox Cap thought about this, and plucked a long grass to chew and help her think. “So,” she said, “a realm is what you are where you are.” She thought more. “No. It’s where you are when you are what you are.”
What was he? What he was when he was without Fox Cap wasn’t what he was when he was with her. If hers was a realm different from his own, how far would he travel in it before it was his own, and he couldn’t return?
“This Raven told me,” Dar Oakley said, “that there is not only a realm of Ravens, and a realm of People, but also a realm of dead People; and in their realm they are not dead, or are alive still in some other way.”
“Ravens are wiser than Crows,” Fox Cap said.
“Is there such a realm? Where dead People are, but not dead?”
“When they are there, they are what they are.”
Dar Oakley shook his head; his thinking was running too fast. “Can you,” he asked, not knowing why he thought Fox Cap would know, just a child after all, huge as she was, “can you go to a realm, or be of a realm, where you aren’t what others are?”
“You can sit beside others who aren’t what you are. You and I do.”
“But you aren’t then in their realm. Are you?”
“You tell me.”
“Can you go to, can you be in, or of, the realm of dead People if you are not as they are? Not dead?”
“I can’t,” she said. “But I am I.”
“Can I?”
“You!” She leapt to her feet, startling him from the Rabbit (who was in no realm but this one). “You carry them!”
“Carry who?” He was suddenly afraid, and defecated nervously.
“The dead People,” Fox Cap said, displaying her open hands as though she had something in them, though there was nothing. “You carry them or take them or lead them. Your kind. Everyone knows that.”
He gaped, open-billed.
“Death-birds,” she said. The wind groomed the speechless grass. “It’s what you are when you are there.”
Death-birds.
Almost as one being the flock comes winging over the moorland by the lake, where below the fighters scurry on their feet and legs toward the fighters coming toward them. Seen from above, it’s as though their feet proceed from their hairy heads and then from their backs in turn. So many of them, each one seeming to go his own way, all scattering to engage the others one to one, but the Crows, no, all together above, single of purpose.
It is no part of the Crows’ concern to wonder why the People do this. For these Crows it’s a living, the dead the People make, and insofar as any Crow heart feels gratitude, they feel it. They are first in the field, days before Ravens or Vultures, because they alone have learned the signs: the fires on the mountainside in the night, the thudding sounds that enlarge the People’s voices hugely, the penning of the beasts and children. A few days before this day, some of the Lake People who went off billwise returned, driving ahead of them a complaining herd of Cattle, which the ones in the settlement greeted with shouts and leaps and the beating of drums, and the Crows had come to recognize that as a sure sign that soon others would come and give battle, take back the Cattle if they could.
And here they are, fighters, more than ever before. So far the People have always chased off those who come to contest with them, but it was easy to see that this could change. If the Lake People were driven back, these others would overrun their dwellings and fields. There would be provision in plenty for Crows then, too much to take. And if the Lake People were all killed and butchered, every one? The Crows have come to depend on the People and their waste and their battles. They have an interest now in all that happens on the beaten grass below.
At dawn, before the two People bands engaged, the Lake People brought out of their settlement a number of males, bound in the way the People bind a Deer they have caught. Things that the Crows couldn’t name, strings of beads and stones and glitter, were hung around them; one looked sick and old; one struggled, the others didn’t, their heads hanging low or held high, waiting. The Singer in his wagon came out, and gave each of them drink from a cup he held to their lips. He sang or spoke a long while, and then two tall, strong ones stepped up and slashed with great weapons at the throats of the kneelers, who tumbled over gently into the grass. Females rushed ululating to them, and with pieces of the wrappings they make, they soaked up the blood.
In all that time the opposing People were coming closer. At the death of the kneelers, they groaned a great groan—those that could see it done—but whether in rage or fear or excitement no Crow could say.
Then it went forward as it did and does, and now the wheeling Crows look down at People who appear to them as lumps of joined heads and arms and feet; they perch in crowds in the trees and then again sail out across the field, impatient, hungry. Impossible to assess what’s going on below. Carriers drawn by Horses plunge in among those on foot—the ones in the carrier take great whacks at those who claw at them to drag them down. Do they all delight in this, as they seem to? Is it laughter, that sound they make with mouths wide? Some have got themselves right up onto the backs of Horses, and kick the Horses’ sides to make them run—they seem the gladdest, and when the attackers are turned back and begin to flee, they make the Horses run after them, stabbing at the fleeing ones with their long, fang-tipped spears and treading their fallen and squirming bodies under the Horses’ hooves. Then a Horse and rider are pulled down and a crowd of the others fall on them like their Dogs falling on meat.
On this day, once again, the Lake People drive off the others. Those of their fighters left alive exult; they grapple with one another, not to do harm but, as it seems, in friendship, though no being that Crows know do that in sign of friendship. Those who didn’t fight gather around the fighters, and lift some to their shoulders, from where they raise weapons down which the blood runs.
In the long bars of late light Dar Oakley on the field went from one dead fighter to another, looking into their faces, if they had faces to look into. Who are you now? he wanted to ask. Dead as you are, where do you go?
Fox Cap had said to him, You carry them. Your kind. But that was absurd. How could Crows ever carry them, and why, lifeless and eviscerated as they were? Yet he felt they called or pleaded.
“Afraid?”
Dar Oakley started and leapt. It was that Crow named Eagle’s Tail.
“No reason to be,” Eagle’s Tail said. “Not of these ones.”
“No.” Dar Oakley lifted his head. “It’s late,” he said.
Night came too soon for Crows to feast, a disappointment. Those who dared to begin on the dead even as the living went among them had got a taste. No matter: already flies were arriving to mate on this flesh and lay their eggs, and in the last of the hot days the wealth would only grow richer in the maggotry and the sun.