The Crows had a different tale, in which the Horse’s well-cleaned gray bones are still there come spring.
Once, Fox Cap had perceived invaders coming who couldn’t be stopped, and they had come, but now they were invaders no longer. They had coupled with the women and sired young and made farms and kept beasts, and centuries on they were the People of that place, as much as Fox Cap had been. There were more People now; they had gone on building walled villages, and with the Brothers to protect them, they were unafraid of cutting old trees, so that the land looked different, wider, barer, more theirs. The other beings—the Wolves, the Elk, the Boar—had grown warier, and stayed farther from them. The People disliked and feared the forest and the mountains even more than they had before; they kept to their well-traveled roads if they could—and so they saw Ravens less often, but Crows they saw every day. They chased Crows from their grain and the farrow of their sows and the eggs and hatchlings of their hens and ducks. They looked up at Crows crossing over their houses and lanes on business of their own; they heard Crows calling to one another but seeming to speak a word to the People below. Maybe it was in those days that young People began to discern their fates in the number of Crows they counted:
One for sorrow
Two for joy
Three for a girl
Four for a boy
Five for silver
Six for gold
Seven for a secret never told
The Crows of the region could have told them that there are almost always more Crows around them than they can see; but like the few snowflakes that fall on your tongue or autumn leaves you can catch, it’s only the ones you can count that matter.
The People had stories, but no history; everything that had happened was still happening. The tall stones that gods and giants had cut and erected in the beginning of the world were still standing, and the Brothers wouldn’t or couldn’t throw them down, though they warned the villagers away from them, except for those (the Brothers knew which) that had been placed by Saints and angels as lessons. When the Brothers had first come, they brought a history with them that they insisted on, a history with a beginning, a middle, and an end. But by now it was stories too, of things that had always been, and still were, and had no end.
The People buried their dead. The Brothers had taught them that those bodies were the vehicles of future life, and couldn’t be burned or given to Crows any longer as once upon a time many of them had been. At the end of all days (which the Brothers said wasn’t so far off), they’d come forth from the places where they’d been laid, and each be reunited with its separated and departed soul, to live forever in the sky, or in the Isles of the Blessed, or in this green land made better, sweeter, without suffering or winter.
Fridays in the Brothers’ settlement were days of silence, and of fish. Since silence was enjoined that day of the week on the Brothers, so it was on Dar Oakley as well. On any other day, he might call from the window of the Brother’s cell or the top of the big building in the center of the compound, and listen to Crow answers come from here and from there. He might fly to where they were, to forage and bicker and take a turn at watch—though the Brother instructed him to give his fellows good counsel, as he gave good counsel to Dar Oakley. But not on the one day in the week when Christ’s death on the Cross was remembered. No, let him stay with the Brothers that day, bow his head, keep silence, and eat fish.
“Corve,” the Brother said, “let us pray. Oremus.”
The Brothers regarded Friday fish as a deprivation, though Dar Oakley didn’t mind, so long as there was plenty; it also spoiled quickly, which the Brothers objected to, but not of course Dar Oakley, who also enjoyed the guts, spoiled or not. From the midden where he had his meal he had heard the Abbot scold the griping Brothers and remind them that not long before they had eaten roots and drunk pond water, and not much of either.
At first Dar Oakley’d been surprised whenever the fish day came around, since Crows have no conception of a period of days; he would anyway have had a hard time keeping as many as seven in his head. But the Brother made a sort of calendar for him that he put on the floor of his cell by the window through which Dar Oakley came and went: six dark stones in a dish, and one white one. Dar Oakley learned to take one stone each evening and put it in another dish, and when they were all moved, a week was done. Then Dar Oakley picked out the white stone and moved it back to the first dish: Sunday. On that day the Brothers did no work; visitors came, a Dux, a Rex, with their cohorts; and in the largest of their stone buildings the Brothers sang all in unison and performed their mysteries (which only certain visitors might witness, and never ever a Crow). When five dark stones had been added to the white stone, it was time again for fish.
The Brothers questioned their youngest Brother’s keeping a tame Crow, a black bird of ill omen, and letting it follow him to work and prayer, and allowing it even to inhabit the little tower of the Church, from where they would see it peering down at them. What, said the Brother—did they want not to be reminded that they were flesh, and would die? He told them (Dar Oakley not then able to understand all he said) they should keep quiet, and not speak that way to him, because he had received a miracle from God, and a creature had been given tongue to speak; they should all go pray that such a blessing might be theirs and God’s favor might be shown to them, as it had been to him, the least of his servants, and if they wanted to argue it further (here pushing up his white sleeves) well, he was ready.
The other Brothers didn’t like this. In fact, they didn’t like him, and he paid them back in kind. He’d been born the younger son of a Dux of that region, who hadn’t liked him either, and as soon as he was old enough, the Dux had taken him to the Abbey, a gift—along with other gifts of treasure and land and tenantry, so that the Brothers might in time pray for the ducal soul.
“Oh, he was a great man,” the Brother told Dar Oakley as he carried his brace of milk jugs on his shoulders from the dairy. “Yes, he slew his hundreds, and sent them down to Hell. And then followed them there himself. And I was the price he paid that he might be forgiven his sins, for which he was not one bit sorry. Fubun on that man, fubun.”
That was one: one of the words that Dar Oakley waited and listened for, one of those that had a sound he recognized in himself, each one like a stone dropped into a well, that made a sudden sound of meaning and then went down into darkness. It was to hear such words and learn new ones that he had come here, and why he stayed. He turned the word in his mind, trying to remember when he had heard it, who had said it in a past time, and what it meant: why it hurt him in his heart to hear it. Fubun.
The Brother was sure the Crow understood him, and understood more the more he was spoken to—why wouldn’t he? And so when the Crow had first come cautiously to the Brother’s window he had talked to it, and gone on talking, and the Crow had listened and learned. The Brother would have gone on talking anyway; talking too much and too loudly was a besetting fault of his, as he was often reminded by his Confessor. He couldn’t, though, perceive what Dar Oakley said back to him—the Brother recognized only the words Dar Oakley could say in the Brother’s own tongue: the names of a few things or notions, and then later the nicknames the Brother had assigned to the others in the Abbey. He laughed when Dar Oakley cawed a belittling nickname at a Brother passing, and then he’d press his long forefinger to his lips, which meant silence.