When next she did that, winged away, he called after her, “Stop!” She didn’t. He fell onto a branch, defeated, and called again, but not a call, “Please stop.”
And she stopped. She took a perch and stayed. He gathered strength and flew to where she was and took a perch not too near, as quietly as he could.
“Why did you stop?” he asked her, and immediately wished he hadn’t, but she only turned her tender left eye on him (the right, he thought, had some cold cunning in it) and said, “Because you asked, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea.”
He thought she could no more cease to behave as she did than he could cease to follow her—but he only thought this afterward, when he could mock himself for his despair at her willfulness. The way she’d fly off in silence if he said the wrong word. The way she’d dare him to please her: on the lake’s shore she’d say to him, “See if you can fly up and dive under this water.”
“I can’t do that! I’m not a Duck.”
“Oh, well then,” she’d say, and leave him there.
Or she’d say, “The Eagle on the heights has hatched young. Go take the flesh she brings to them and bring some here to me.”
This he actually (it was spring!) wondered if he might try to do. But before he could brace himself for it, she was laughing at him. Mad Crow! Did she even mean the things she said? Could she really not make up her mind about him or was it all just a tease, a game she’d played before? He didn’t any longer know how old he was himself, but he felt she was older than he, knew more about these things, had maybe even had a mate, maybe long ago; but when he questioned her, she only said, “Life’s long, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea.”
At last on a day of warm, stifling wind and mist he was with her on the ground watching her eat—he seemed to have lost his own appetite just for the moment—and another male, big, loud, unkempt, landed between them and began to make gestures toward Kits. No! Dar Oakley went for him without a thought, and the bird laughed and dodged his attacks as though Dar weren’t worthy of a response, and turned toward Kits again—and Kits charged him too, fierce, furious, and ran off the astonished Crow, get away! Dar Oakley joined in, chasing him a long way and feeling himself grow larger as he flew. When the lout was well gone, they descended together, laughing, bill to bill, he delighting in her, she in him.
After that it went on between them as it does and must but as it never had before, for Dar Oakley anyway, so that soon he was no longer single but doubled by the inclusion of Kits in him and he in her, all the time, everywhere; the process or dance of it took no thought at all. They didn’t agree to build a nest, but a nest was started—not in the crotch of the Oak at the edge of the old freehold, where he’d imagined that it would be laid when he was young and single; no, she chose a place more modest and concealed, as his own mother had. They knew how to build it, she maybe because she’d seen it or done it once or twice or many times; he’d never done it but he knew too, and the more they did it, the more they knew how to do it, and the more they knew how to do it, the more they knew what made them do it.
“Don’t bring more of those, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea.”
“No? I thought . . .”
“Just look at it.”
“Oh.”
“This. This is good. Bring more of this.”
“It’s all I found.”
“Go find more.”
“Kits!” he said. Without thinking he took her black bill in his to make her stop. All in a moment they were fighting, then not fighting.
That was the what, and he knew it. It was sure to come, yet couldn’t have been imagined before it came. Huge as it was, it lasted only a moment, a moment’s contact and a spasm, but Dar Oakley was as stunned by it as if he really had dived under water, or been thrown right up into the sun. One bird. Right away they began again, but less certainly; abashed, maybe, by the power of it. He moved clumsily to cover her and this time she flew from him, or from it.
Dar Oakley open-billed, wings spread low, ashamed and angry.
Soon enough, though—on the nest’s edge, on the ground below it, then even in the air around about—they came to recognize its coming on, came to expect it, to earn it together, to gain it, or fail to. Succeeding often enough (as his mother’s Servitor once said) that they knew the forming chicks in all the green eggs she’d lay were his and hers alone. Whereupon it—the what—began to turn from sudden and hot to steady and warm, so that in the greening days Dar Oakley was able to ponder it, how he’d become double, and what he’d now have to do and bear. And he could bear it too. Like any Crow.
Here we go again, his mother’d said. He laughed to think of that.
“What?” Kits on her eggs inquired, bored and fretful, hardly visible above the nest’s edge.
“Nothing,” Dar Oakley said. “Nothing at all.” He hadn’t visited the old freehold, hadn’t seen his mother in many seasons. Did she still live? It wasn’t a Crow thing to wonder about. She, like him and like Kits, had surely known that first time with Father, and perhaps could have told her son about it. Perhaps did tell him. He thought then of the time he had been with Fox Cap and the Singer on the high ledge and the Singer had talked of the bond between the living and the dead, the dead from whom the living learned to live, even as those dead had learned from others who lived and died before them. Crow never dies, he’d said.
“What will become of them?” Dar Oakley asked of no one. “How will they do?”
“What I wonder is,” Kits said, mocking just a little, “what their names will turn out to be.”
It was high summer when at last the preparations had been made and the People went out from their settlement toward the place from which they had come, to take back their dead who remained there.
The old and the very young were left behind to mind the herds, drive the flocks to the summer grasslands, keep the fires going, and gather from the fields. The others went out the gates of the palisade, carrying food to eat on the way, and pots to cook it in; they drove Sheep and Goats for food and milk, and also for gifts—one big male walking with a kid across his shoulders. The warriors went first, with their weapons and the strong pelts they wore studded with iron to stop a weapon, and caps the same. Carts carried the Biggers, one propping up a sword so large that no one could ever wield it in a fight—Kits said that it surely wasn’t intended to be put to use, so it was only to stand for the strength and force of the Lake People. So many things they did and made and carried only to stand for other things; the trouble they took about it.
“We too,” Kits said. “To them we are what we stand for. We Crows.”
“Death-birds,” Dar Oakley said.
They went out with a huge noise from their drums and from their horns (the Crows’ vocabulary of People words grew every day) that were shaped like Snakes, the tail in the blower’s mouth, the Snake’s long body rising up, its mouth open wide from which the sounds came.
“But Snakes make no sound,” Kits said.
Some People blew into the hollowed horns of Rams.
“At least Rams make noises,” Kits said.
“Not like that,” Dar Oakley said. The Crows of this region had never known of Rams before People came, but now they did.