“Those are their Biggers,” Cuckoo’s Egg said. “I’d suppose.”
No one disagreed. They could see, though, that those Biggers deferred to the one that Dar Oakley knew as With the Fox Cap but for whom the other Crows had no name. She bore no weapons; she was dressed simply, still neither as male nor female. She sat still. But she was the center of this, whatever it was.
Up on the rock ledge where the Singer’s body had been laid—the Crows could easily see that far—the bier remained, and now there were other biers nearby it. The place was marked with tall poles to which wind-stirred things like broad wings had been attached. The rock wall behind, which Fox Cap had climbed to stir Dar Oakley to action, had been scored in whorls and patterns, and marks that the Crows could not see as faces. The steep ascent to this place from the flat land had been widened, and steps cut for feet.
“Look there,” said Two Mates.
A group toiled upward there, bringing amid them a thing that was growing familiar to Crows—a thing of sticks lashed together with hide ropes, on which lay a figure bound in wrappings, only the white face visible as yet, but soon to be all bared.
“Ah yes,” said Kits.
“Looks small,” said Cuckoo’s Egg.
“Still,” said Two Mates.
“Time to go to work,” said Kits—or something resembling that in the tongue of Ka, which had no words for time or work. Kits whetted her long bill three times, clack clack clack, and they dropped down to greet the People climbing up.
Not all the People’s dead were brought there. Some were burned in great greasy fires whose smoke drove away every other living thing but People; some were put into boats with gifts or possessions around them, and the boat was sunk where the lake was deep. Some unfriended or inconsiderable People were just put in holes in the ground and covered up. But the warriors, the Biggers, their mates, their dead children: it was these ones that were given to Crows for the work they did. (That work with the dead, that practice, has a lovely and fearful name in our People language. It’s called excarnation.)
Dar Oakley schooled the Crows in how to behave near People now. No more loitering at the midden, quarreling with Dogs. No more petty thievery. No more riding the Hogs’ backs and digging the fat blood-filled ticks from their thick skin—it was beneath their new dignity. It was all good advice, and some Crows heeded it some of the time. Also, he said, they should notice when one of the People was carried into his dwelling and didn’t come out again; or when one grew swollen as a gorged snake with young about to drop. Then gather nearby, on the roofs of their dwellings, and show yourselves ready. Some of the Crows commenced doing this, though not many Crows can tell one of the People from another, dying or gravid or not.
“Fine,” said the Crow Kits to Dar Oakley, “but we aren’t Ravens; you know we can’t be as solemn as they can.”
“The People think that Ravens are wiser than Crows,” Dar Oakley answered. “But it might be that they can’t tell us apart all the time.”
“Ha! One or the other,” said Kits.
This Kits, by the way, had got her name because of a story about a mother Fox she’d seen.
That vixen had gone mad, she’d told the Crows. And was eating her kits.
Eating them?
Two, just born. She ate them both.
No! Nothing left of them?
Well, Kits had replied, not much. And she clacked her bill three times.
That story always got a laugh.
Kits was unmated, though surely old enough to be; she had a look about her different from Crows thereabouts, her head as black as her wings where their heads were duller, her plumage deepest blue-black, glossy and shot through with iridescence, violet and purple and even scarlet, that came and went. No one could tell Dar Oakley where in the demesne she’d been born or who her kin were—a vagrant, a newcomer, but that was long ago it seemed, during the time that had apparently passed while Dar Oakley was elsewhere. He found it hard not to stare at her, and he thought about her even when she wasn’t there, and said her name to himself: Kits. It was coming on spring.
“When the planting is done,” Fox Cap said to him, “and the lambing and calving are over, then we’ll go. You’ll come too.”
Dar Oakley never stopped marveling at the way she, and all her kind probably, could think forward into seasons not yet come, what might happen then and what they’d do. It was like the way they thought about seasons past, and regretted or rejoiced at what they’d done then.
She stood, arms crossed, by the lakeshore. Mist rose from the still-icy surface, drawn away gently by dawn winds. The island in the center of the lake was leafless, pale and transparent, as though it could be reft away too by the moving air. There the Singer’s bones had been taken when even the Jackdaws were done with them; they’d been put under the ground in a great pot, and a number of tall stones were borne out over the water with great effort (one lost in the depths) and set up, as tall as stone People, around the place. Dar Oakley could not have seen those stones standing there before the Singer’s bones were placed in the center of them, and yet he knew he had.
Fox Cap spoke of him often, and had decided that she must do what the Singer had asked: she and the People would return to the place from which they had first come, where their old dead lay; and they would bring those dead here. To the upside-down houses that the People here were making for them.
So Kits was right: houses for People not to live in but to be dead in.
“We’ll all go,” Fox Cap said. “Everyone here. All of you, too.”
“It’s a busy time,” Dar Oakley said, looking away. “Young just born. All the care.”
“Not for you, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea. You’re like me.”
She meant unmated, single, free.
“Well,” he said. “I don’t know.”
Fox Cap turned to him, as though roused from her thoughts. “Don’t know what?”
“Well, I don’t know, anymore,” he said, and flitted in embarrassment. “That’s all.”
It had happened to countless Crows for countless generations, but of course for every Crow to whom it happens, it happens for the first time in the world. What Dar Oakley felt as the season turned was that his being had doubled in size, because his being included another’s. How could that be? How could it be that someone so swift, so smart, so big, could come to be part of himself? Wherever he happened to go as the days lengthened, like as not he’d find Kits already there, or arriving soon after, surprised too, but not as surprised as he was.
“You,” she’d say. “I know you.”
There was, he thought, some strand of something that connected them, something they couldn’t see or feel, some tightening web. Wonderful. Later on though he’d think, Well, she just kept her eye on me and knew where I might go, and went there too, which seemed just as wonderful, really, if you thought about it, which at the time he couldn’t have done. He’d just marvel, and beck suavely, and say his name, which he couldn’t help but think she knew well enough.
She was rarely alone anyway, wherever she was. Males he’d never seen before would cluster around her, seemingly distilled out of the black earth or the rocks—rage that they dared approach her, that she should accept their presence! For the first time he understood that gloomy and suspicious Crow his father. Not that any of them mattered to her; she’d up and fly off in an unhurried way as though vanishing and leave them all behind, and Dar Oakley, too, to stare at one another. How could she go so slow so fast? If he got his courage up and beat after her, she’d stay always ahead of him; he’d lose sight of her and then in banking and turning this way and that he’d spot her far ahead, resting, not waiting for him especially; when he got close enough to plan to perch beside her, he couldn’t find where she’d been sitting. Gone again.