In the trees around them, from which they observed the People passing, Kits’s fledglings perched, all strong, all flying now: the four that had hatched. They flitted, changed places, pecked at wood, waited to be told where next to go for food, called in the pleading tones of nestlings as often as they called like grown-ups. Their names were . . . Dar Oakley has forgotten their names.
After the bellowers and hooters came Fox Cap, standing in a cart, shaken and distracted. Dar Oakley took a higher perch to see. A few young Crows without anything better to do were following the crowd at a distance.
“Is that One?” Kits asked—using the word for a being whose sex isn’t known.
“Yes.”
“Are you going to follow One?” Kits said.
“I can’t,” Dar Oakley said. “The young.”
“They’re almost grown.”
“Their eyes are still blue,” Dar Oakley said. “They don’t know when the Toads migrate; they can’t tell a Fox from an Otter.”
“You want to go. Go.”
“You come too.”
“I can’t come. The young ones need me.”
Dar Oakley flitted, uneaseful, pointing his bill earthwise, skywise. The People’s noise diminished.
“If you don’t go,” Kits said, “we won’t know what happened, will we? And why, and what for, and all that.”
She said it as though she’d heard those words from him, not once before but many times, and as though that was endearing but annoying, too. He felt it as a challenge, but not one that could be met, and he didn’t try. With the feeling of tearing a primary from a wing, he left her and the young. Kits called the call Watch out after him like a sharp dag from her black bill.
He flew till he reached where Fox Cap was, and went out above her, banking and turning gracefully in the air. Kits was right: he stood for something as much as he was something, a Crow; it was what he had to give to the People for what the Crows had got. When the line of them passed under trees, he went to join a few other laughing Crows there who’d also gone off on this adventure; then he took a perch right on the cart’s rails, clinging as it rolled, to show he wasn’t afraid—though the younger Crows would do no such bold thing. After a time Fox Cap tired of the jolting and climbed out and went walking on, marking her steps with a long staff.
Before the summer sun was down, those in the lead called a halt, and made fires. The fires would signal to those far behind on the path: Here we are. Warriors on a raid would never light fires, Fox Cap told Dar Oakley, but she wanted the ones in the old settlement to know they weren’t coming in darkness for war or to steal things. And on the third day they saw riders on a rise far off daywise, who watched them for a time and then faded away: scouts, come to see and to report.
On the fifth day they came in sight of their old settlement. Keening and cries of mourning arose from the old ones among the walkers to see it. There was a squat tower on a hill above the dwellings, which Dar Oakley took at first for the stump of an enormous fallen tree. A palisade taller than the Lake People’s, many of the posts holding skulls, dead enemies now made into sentinels. Smoke of many fires. Dar Oakley could see—though the People couldn’t yet—that the People who lived outside the walls were driving their animals toward the gates of the palisade, and hurrying inside.
“This was ours,” Fox Cap said to Dar Oakley, though no one else knew whom she spoke to—she was known to speak often with unseen ones. “It’s greater now, the old ones say. Those are strong ones who live there, who pushed us out. Stronger than us.”
“But you drove them away in the battles. Killed many of them.”
“Because they came where we made new homes. It’s our ground.”
Dar Oakley thought Crows would understand that. He wondered if the skulls on the palisade might have belonged to Fox Cap’s People.
Horns and drums. Out from the gate came mounted People. Fox Cap raised her hand to stop the Lake People from going farther, and when they were all gathered there on the edge of the planted land, she set out alone with her staff to meet the warriors coming toward her. The Crows who had followed the People went to the trees, calling to one another in anticipation.
But there was no fighting. Dar Oakley wished he could tell the restive People what he could see and they couldn’t, that Fox Cap had gone down through the fields and the grasses until the riders could see her, and then sat down on the ground there and crossed her legs like a child, the child she had long ago been, and waited for the riders. Her tall staff showed them the place. They came around her. Dar Oakley was afraid to get too near them, but he could hear the jingle of their iron. And she began to speak to them.
Near sunset the riders went away. Fox Cap went on sitting. The Crows called to one another; they went to find food while there was light, and a roost for the night. The People brought food to Fox Cap, and a mantle to keep her warm.
That was the first meeting. Through the next day they all waited. Fox Cap’s staff, standing alone in the field, made Dar Oakley think of the sticks that the first two People he had ever seen had planted in the earth above the lake. The sun was low when the riders came again, with a Bigger among them (it was easy to tell), and a cart that bore a child in wrappings of green, who carried a freshly broken branch of Oak. The People couldn’t see that, but Dar Oakley could; and he could see Fox Cap’s eyes turn from the child and the riders up to where Dar Oakley perched in the trees. He saw her sly smile, as though she were playing a game here.
There was more talk, and then Fox Cap was lifted into the cart with the boy in green, and they all went toward the settlement and the palisade, and disappeared inside.
That was the second meeting.
By then the Crows of that region had got wind of these invader Crows, and gathered to drive them away from their demesne, their groves and hunting grounds. Get, get! Greatly outnumbered, Dar Oakley’s band retreated, and turned homeward. So the only fighting that day was among the Crows. Dar Oakley’s gang heard no more of what happened at the old settlement until the People came home.
When they did, they came bearing their old dead. They had got what they wanted.
The Lake People who had stayed behind in the settlement came out, and some went far along the track to hail the returning ones and their burdens. Crows came too, as was right—Dar Oakley told them—and flew above, calling. First came their banners thrashing in a rising wind, then the warriors and strong ones carrying pots and improvised carriers, bones gray and brown heaped on them with care, some wrapped in bright cloths. Other bones wrapped in the cloth of their own blackened skin. Old female weeping as she walked, carrying a child’s relics. Earth-stained skulls darker than their teeth, carried in the carts that before had carried the Biggers, now honoring these. No horns, no drums: they walked in silence. There was Fox Cap, and with her the boy dressed in green, holding her hand.
“What do they want with bones?” Cuckoo’s Egg said, looking down. “I thought they thought the dead People go off to live somewhere else, and leave this refuse behind.”
“No, no,” said Two Mates. “You don’t get it. They think the bones and what’s stuck to them are alive, and can feel the honor. I’m sure I heard that.”
“You’re both right,” Kits said. “Don’t ask me how.”
“They’re that and not.”
“They’re here and there.”
“They’re where those alive can’t go.”
“And don’t want to go.”
They laughed loud, the three Crows.
The world would be changed by what Fox Cap had done. She’d won back the dead; they’d now be put with songs and keening and the aromatic smoke of fires into the upside-down houses to rest there forever. She’d done it by yielding to the greater strength of those who’d seized the old settlement, by offering that her People would be the lesser of the two, if only they could have these remains, to lie here where People they had known, or their descendants, now lived. For that the Lake People would give the new possessors of their old home place honor and deference, not raid their cattle or burn their crops as they had done before, but pay tribute instead.