“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.