“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.