“It certainly is,” Dar Oakley said.
“You,” Va Thornhill said, “have no mate.”
This was true just then, though Dar Oakley knew he had had mates, and young, too. “But this is easy prey,” he said. “Rich. If I bring it, can you bring the Crows?”
“Well,” said Va Thornhill. “I just said.”
Suddenly Dar Oakley descended and came down heavily so close to Va Thornhill that the big Crow dodged away. “Tell me not to bother and I won’t,” he said. “I’d just as soon. If the Brothers caught me at it, I’d be killed.” He aimed a darkwise eye at Va Thornhill. “And you don’t need those Wolf leavings, do you? There’s always bugs to find, no? Peewits’ eggs. This and that.”
Va Thornhill eyed him back. “You just go learn what you can, Dar Oakley,” he said in a sudden angry hiss. “If you’re so sure. Come tell us. We’ll bring the Wolves in.” He turned back to his search for soft nest linings. “Somehow I think you know more than you say, Dar Oakley.”
“How could that be?” Dar Oakley said, bill high, an honest Crow. “We’re kin, aren’t we?”
The Brother’s kin knew all about the Wolves gang. They had the region in fear, doors barred in the night, householders listening for the horrid wail of them. A storm of hail that had nearly destroyed the springing crops was certainly their doing, or had been caused by their evil. How could they be fought against? By all reports they weren’t men at all but great demons who drank up the blood of their victims, one taller than a tree—a bird twice a man’s height—beings with tusks and claws both. When the fighters of the clan had gone in search of them, they’d vanished into air and couldn’t be found.
“No, no,” the Brother told his kin. “Men, mere men. Thieves. Godless. Not drinkers of blood. Killers, yes—but cowards, killers of women and children.”
The uncles and brothers and sisters gathered in the hall weren’t sure. Those Wolves, they said, were always accompanied by a murder of Crows—death-birds with devil souls. Here the uncles and brothers regarded Dar Oakley perched on the back of the Brother’s chair. Who lowered his head humbly.
“Not this Crow,” the Brother said, pointing to Dar Oakley. “This Crow has repented of his evil ways, and hopes for redemption. Watch.” He turned to the Crow up behind him and said, “Corve. Who made you?”
Dar Oakley twisted his tongue within his mouth and squeezed his larynx. God, he croaked. God. The Brother’s kin made sounds all together, moans of awe or cries of delight and wonder. Some drew away, some leaned forward.
“Bless this house, Corve, and its Dux and his lady.”
Dar Oakley lifted his bill up, down, darkwise, daywise. The People looked at each other and nodded. The hall was dim and smelly—the People-smell of wool and smoke, cooked food and soured ale. The Brother’s elder brother, head of the clan since their father’s death, sat in a tall seat, the others around him on stools or standing. Being so close to so many, armed and thickly bearded, was uncomfortable, almost unbearable, but Dar Oakley didn’t think he could make it to the small, low window without being caught or struck by a weapon. So he kept still and tried to obey.
How had it come to be that he was now a Crow who did what People asked of him? Once done with this, he wouldn’t anymore.
Since morning the Brother had laid out before his People the story and the plan, and they had argued and declaimed. Now the Brother opened his satchel and took out a little box of wood and beaten gold, and after he had murmured words in his other language, he opened it. The clan around him made again that sound, of satisfaction, awe, fear, whatever it was.
From his perch on the chair Dar Oakley peeked in. Inside the box was a small, yellowed meatless bone. Dar Oakley thought he knew where it had come from, and having lived so long with the Brothers, he felt a strange shudder of fear or guilt at what the Brother had done. The clan came close and bent over the box. Some of them knelt. All their eyes were on the bone, and it seemed to Dar Oakley that the pressure of their looking drew something from it: the fragment of toe or finger faintly but distinctly began to glow.
“Blessed Saint,” the Brother addressed it, “who has helped us in the past. Help us now to defeat the enemies who afflict us. Help us to avenge those who have no kin of their own to do it. In Jesus’s name we ask this.”
Dar Oakley, with all the others, bowed his head.
Crows, flying singly and by twos and threes into the forest that covers the mountain. When some halt to rest, others coming on behind overfly them; when they rest, the ones that they passed pass them. The whole body of them moves forward that way, calling now and then to the scouts and those standing to watch over their passing, and their calls keep the flock—that part of it engaged in this action, the smart curious ones, the Biggers—together, going toward what they know they seek.
On the faint track that goes through the trees and over the hump of the hill and down into the shadow of the glen, a small band of People hasten, two males and a female, a few Sheep, burdens, staves. When they have gone down from the sun-shot heights into the shadows, they stop; here the path goes through a narrow place between high rocks, and a stream has cut a passage. Overhead in the trees the Crows have noticed them, and some are already going back the way they came with the news: People on the trail, with their animals, vulnerable.
The Wolves at their camp in caves overhung with vines and low-hanging branches of Yew look up: they hear the Crows, and by now can tell when those birds speak to their kind and when they speak to the Wolves. Clever birds! Calling their women, the Wolves begin to prepare, turning themselves into other beings, laughing, ululating.
Later now, and the travelers have set themselves up in that unpromising place by the stream, and seem ready to spend the night; and night is coming. They look around themselves, into the trees, back the way they came, as though expecting to see what soon they do see: apparitions of impossible beasts, rushing toward them, gesticulating. They don’t run, they don’t prepare to resist though they grip their staves tighter; they cling together, and seem resigned, as certain animals can do in the presence of predators.
The People beasts have set up their ghastly keening, voices or instruments; their followers rush in after them, and the travelers sink farther into themselves; a Crow looking down thinks they have shut tight their eyes. One of the Wolves lifts his ax. At that sign, as though summoned by it, other People, armed too and yelling, burst out of the cover of the woods where they have hidden and charge the Wolves from behind; and from down the path leading from the rocks, horsemen, swords drawn.
The watching Crows, scandalized, mystified, rise up higher into the trees. What’s this? Who? Fly! Stay! Dar Oakley—just then arriving among them—looks on, not amazed like them but not showing that he isn’t, he hopes. What does amaze him, as the mounted People charge in among the Wolves, is to see the Brother among them, though he said he was forbidden to be. White skirts pushed up between his legs and his sandaled feet sticking out, he rides up behind one of his clan, raising a sword too, yelling too.
The Wolves are caught in the throat of the rocks between the ones on foot behind them and the horsemen ahead. Those “travelers” have fled away into the trees. The Dux coming in on a big dappled gray whacks at the bird-beast, who is trying to extricate himself from his disguise; he gets free and is trying to climb the rocky ledge when the Brother, who is also the brother of the Dux, comes at him. The rider twists his Horse in the narrow space and the Brother, on the Horse’s bobbing rump, brings his sword down on the bandit’s head, and again. The bandit falls, tries to touch his hurt head, tries to rise and can’t; lies still.