Dar Oakley had his Crow sight back.
The trees ceased looking at him, the sky didn’t ponder him, and the sun lost its face. The cold air rising from the lake was blue. The world around lay all open to his eye.
There, far off, over in that place there—he saw a shimmer of blue-black-violet iridescence: Crows on the ground, busy together at something. Clear as could be. What had they found there to eat?
He called again, Ka! Ka! and from as far off as his call could be heard, cries came in answer. Who are you and what do you want? they said, but Dar Oakley answered only Ka!, and the others called again, and together their calls wove the world. Another call came from another direction, clearly billwise, yes: Come closer and I’ll drive you off, you bet. Dar Oakley laughed, and at his laugh the dun fields and golden woods, the far river, the Crow demesne, grew stronger, plainer. His long sight looked over it. Ka was, and he was there.
Only when Fox Cap returned to her village did she understand that not one season but years had passed in the few days since she had gone into the forest after her stolen cap. Those she had known had grown older, and some were dead; new dwellings had been built, and new families lived in them. She nearly died of strangeness. The Singer, more aged but not changed, was the only one not surprised to see her, the only one not to keep a cautious distance from her. He took her in his arms as she wept, and for a long time she stayed with him, pale and speechless, and he cared for her.
All this she later related to Dar Oakley.
For Dar Oakley, too, years had perhaps passed in a season, but it was harder to tell. Certainly he found many strangers at the new winter roost, but then there always were strangers there. The one he called Younger Sister had returned to the flock, alone and gloomier than ever: the Vagrant her mate had one day gone out to the far border of the little freehold they had got, she told Dar Oakley, and not returned; she couldn’t find him ever after. There was no more to be said about that. It did puzzle Dar Oakley that, when he asked her if she’d had young after all, she sighed profoundly and said, Oh yes, many, many. But when he tried to question the other Crows about how long he’d been gone, they mostly said they hadn’t remarked his going away, and so hadn’t noticed him return again.
He took a place among them, and asked no more.
So that’s how Dar Oakley, who wished to go to a place where there are no Crows, became of all the Crows a traveler for real, and without flying far, to pass from his own realm into another, a realm so distant that life and death were different there, and then come back again with news of it, if back was where he came to. He believes that he was the first and only being not of Ymr to know such a realm—and though it may be that he’s wrong about that, he is certainly the first and only Crow to go on passing between Here and There from that far time down to this. How that long power or burden came to be his is the story that he tells—it might as well be called the story that he is.
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.