Worse: the storyteller said nothing about why Dar Oakley wanted to find the thing without a name. It wasn’t in order to live forever. It wasn’t for himself at all; he didn’t need it, and knew enough not to want it. He hadn’t been selfish, or sneaky, though you could never convince People that a Crow of whatever kind wasn’t both, all the time.
And Dar Oakley’d never dreamed a dream in all his several lives; he was sure he didn’t know what one was.
In an autumn here many seasons before this, Dar Oakley had found himself living among a flight of deeply black, supremely self-satisfied birds—Crows like the Crow who had looked down on him from a black-limbed tree on his last day alive. In fact he found himself to be one of them, as big and black as they, primaries long and strong, breast a sheen of colors.
He was looking into a still forest pool when he found himself, his reflected face ringed by fallen leaves: a Crow of this place. He seemed to be looked at by that face, as though by another Crow, who knew something about him that he didn’t; and in a flash of certainty he knew that in truth he wasn’t this Crow whose face he saw, or hadn’t always been. He had been another Crow in other times; and there were times when he had not been at all.
Whenever Dar Oakley finds himself—as by now he has done over and over—he finds more of himself than he found the time before.
As he looked into the still water at the strange Crow looking back, he remembered crossing the sea with the Terns, the Brother in Hell; he remembered Fox Cap; he remembered the clatter of the golden horsemen, and the archer who shot him. He remembered that so-black bird who had looked down on him in the wind and rain the last time he died; the trees around him now were just as brilliant as they had been on that day, but he didn’t think that this was then, or that these trees were those.
A Frog’s face broke the surface of the little pond he looked into, and shattered Dar Oakley’s reflection. With a long, strong bill he stabbed it, shook it, and swallowed it down.
And he remembered the Most Precious Thing: the reason he was here, the reason he had been anywhere he had been, and why in time to come he would be where he would be. Something about the cold Frog in his throat had brought it back: how he had taken that cold nothing in his bill, and fled with it, and lost it. Yet never parted from it, or ever could.
Nothing.
He heard Crows then, and lifted his head. Crows of his own lineage, far off, repeating calls from even farther off, making known that something of interest was up, all those of the lineage who heard should come see. And bearing his new burden of memory he rose up, calling his own call.
There hadn’t been lineages among the Crows where he had come from in Ka, but here there were, and he knew his own: his children and their children, their mothers and the mothers of their mothers, their mothers’ brothers and sisters too, all of them forming a stripe like a silver brook or stream seen from high up at evening, a stream bound to other streams from which it sprang or into which it flowed, all of them different but part of a whole that was distinct from Crows in generaclass="underline" this whole was a clan, his clan. There had not been clans either in the realm where (he now knew) he’d once lived, where he’d first been born.
He sensed as much as saw movement along the march of tall trees, Crows going toward the far callers somewhere daywise-of-billwise. After following for a time he caught up with one and called her name. She settled in a tall Maple and awaited him.
“Fighters returning from a raid,” she said. “Crow clan. Bringing captives.”
The People of that place and time belonged to clans and lineages too, clans named for beings other than themselves, beings they took as their sign or symboclass="underline" a thing Crows never did and couldn’t really understand. But there are hard and easy ways to get a living, and to be held in honor by People is one of the easy ones. Crows profited from the Crow clan, though Turtles got nothing from the Turtle clan except to have their shells turned into drums.
“How far?” Dar Oakley asked.
“Let’s go see,” said the other, whose name was Gray Feather; she was named for a hurt primary that after molt always grew in again gray, not black.
There hadn’t been names in the lands of Ka where Dar Oakley’d begun; Crows hadn’t possessed one each, not till Dar Oakley learned the language of People and found out about names. He remembered all that now, the story of it; he recalled it, which is to him as though he hears a call from a place he once inhabited and a being once himself, and answers.
The triangulating calls of the widespread lineage now were drawing the Crows to a People trail that wound along beside a fast-tumbling shallow river, sometimes closer to it, sometimes farther. As the People moved along it the calls followed, until Crows were in the trees along the way and keeping the People in sight. It was easy to tell which of the People were Crow clan and which were captives: the Crow clan wore necklaces, skirts, and leggings of Deer’s skin, black Crow feathers in their hair, where the captives were naked, filthy, hurt, and stumbling under heavy burdens. The clan fighters took notice of the Crows around them, and raised weapons to salute them: their own birds, coming to welcome them.
“There,” said Gray Feather to Dar Oakley, and leapt to a new branch to see better. “That one, look.”
One of the captives, slight and young it seemed, had fallen behind the others as the path rose steeply through a rocky place. He seemed to be hardly able to take steps, and had almost come to a halt when another captive higher up on the trail noticed him. Though burdened himself, he turned back toward the failing one. When the clan fighters saw this, that he might go help the younger one, they beat him back with their heavy clubs, nearly driving him to his knees. Two fighters went to the slighter captive, pulled off his burdens (peltry, skins, other captured stuff), and when he staggered and reached out for help to stand, a fighter lifted his club high and with a blow to his head killed him. Anyway he lay still. The Crows who saw it fell silent a moment. The fighter who’d struck the captive took a stone knife and cut at his head, and with a cry pulled off the hair and the skin and waved it aloft. The other fighters cheered. They kicked and shoved the body to the edge of the trail and off into the gullied rocks below; it rolled a distance, arms flopping will-lessly, and came to a stop, supine, the bleeding head downward. They loaded his burdens onto the tall captive, the one who had turned back perhaps to help; he bent under the weight, but bore it. The fighters pushed the captives back into line and started again up the path.
The Crows—who had expected all this—watched the fighters and the other captives pass one by one up the trail. One fighter cupped his hand by his mouth and gave a call in imitation of the Crow call that means Come see what’s here, and though most of the Crows couldn’t hear that in it, it didn’t matter: they were here, and they knew why. The dead captive’s eyes were open, his mouth open too and his tongue exposed. His many wounds bled freshly. The Crows had no rivals for the wealth they looked down on, and that was because of the long patronage of the Crow clan of the People, which they had elicited just by being the Crows that People wanted and needed.
Dar Oakley had taught them that, over time: how People could provide, if you understood them. And looking down this day at the thing caught in the rockfall below, he thought how he had learned those tricks and taught them to Crows in other times and places too, times and places and Crows that he’d forgotten till now.
“Hungry?” Gray Feather asked him.
“Never not,” Dar Oakley said.