A day later the slow-moving war party and its captives reached their home place. Dar Oakley had lingered at the cadaver of the dead captive for a time, gorging with the rest, but the Ravens had come, and then the Vultures, and he’d grown restless and filled with thoughts. He went on, and reached the Crow People village just when the walkers did. He flew up into a tall Pine, too far for them to see him, though he could see them. All the People—men, women, and children—were standing in two long lines before the palisade of tall stakes. When the fighters came in sight, they cheered and waved the sticks and the hide whips and weapons they held. The strutting fighters came in, pulling their captives with ropes tied around their necks. When the wealth they carried had been displayed and exclaimed over, the captives were tugged resisting into line. The gantlet—those two lines of People—wasn’t run, though run is the word you hear now: rather the captives were jerked along slowly by the ropes around their necks, so that everyone had a chance to strike at them or prod them with burning brands, on their backs, their arms and legs—but not their hands, or their faces. If a captive flinched, or staggered, or cried out, he’d be hit and whipped and burned all the more. Dar Oakley and the Crows of the lineage—those that didn’t shy from People or dislike Dogs or fire—had seen all of this done before: it was what happened when captives were brought back. The noise, People and Dogs and drums, was terrific.
That tall one, the one who on the trail had turned back to help the faltering one, walked with head high and eyes forward, seeming not to notice the crowd he passed through, shaking the blows from his body as though they were annoying insects. Dar Oakley saw now what he’d missed before: two fingers of one hand had recently been torn off, the stumps still bloody. When the People shouted at him, he responded to them, nothing Dar Oakley could hear, but spoken as though he were conversing with friends—it was a People way of speaking, though not while blood ran down backs and legs. Is that your kinswoman? Is that the hardest she can hit? Sometimes the People laughed at what he said, not in scorn (Dar Oakley can’t really describe in Crow words these subtleties of human talk that he sensed) but amused, as though he mocked one of them to amuse the rest. Still they went on thrashing him.
When they reached the open place in the palisade, one of the captives fell. The People descended on him, giving him the same kicks they gave their Dogs, beating and beating him with fierce and incomprehensible rage. When the others were taken within, this one was left, twisted and still.
Now the Crows—more had come in—took a real interest. The lineage of these Crows was numerous; winter was coming on, when food would be scarce. That was the sum of Crow thinking.
The Crows didn’t witness it—by then they were off asleep—but within the town the torture and humiliation of the naked captives went on through the night, with drumming and fires. Another of the captives died under it, or was killed as useless to his captors. But at least one survived: the one with two fingers torn away.
What the Crows couldn’t know and wouldn’t anyway have pondered was why People treated captives in the way they did. When later Dar Oakley learned the reason and tried to explain it to the Crows, they mostly didn’t believe him: those captives had been taken and brought back to be replacements for sons and brothers and sisters and children who had earlier been seized from the Crow clan in raids by other lineages, other clans, other Peoples. The captured ones were to become the ones who had been taken; the ones that the captives’ own clan had earlier killed.
The mourning families—the women, mostly—decided which of the captives would be spared to become People of their clan, and which would be killed and thrown to the Dogs, the Vultures, and the Crows. Which was greater, a woman’s longing for revenge, or her grief at her loss? Those who sustained the tortures well were mostly permitted to live.
The tall, proud one: after they’d done more to him, waiting for him to break, they ordered him to sing—insult after injury. He sang in his own language, and they yelled and mocked him, but they listened, too, and called for more. So he sang differently; he pointed at this one and that one, and the Crow People laughed at the ones who were made fun of by his words. Then his song changed again. The People listening grew quiet, and some of the women wept. At last the eldest of the women stood, and with a wave sent away the tormentors, the men and the children.
Then everything changed. Dar Oakley would be told of it later: how the captive was taken into the lodge and fed and cared for, his atrocious wounds treated. His new mother put food in his mouth with her own hands, bound his wounds with poultices. When he was healed he was within a new family, of a new clan, who fed him and loved him and taught him their speech and their ways. He could only lose that proffered love by resisting it, by holding on to what he had been, refusing the menial children’s tasks he must begin his new life with.
The family that this captive earned by his courage and his submission had once had a son taken in a raid by others from elsewhere; that son might be dead or he might not be, but he was lost to them. Now they had a son again, a son restored, just as beautiful, and wiser; a son who would in time lose the knowledge that he had ever been anyone else.
That was why the captives were treated as they were: in the madness of torture they’d lose every loyalty, however deep, every memory of home they had; die as themselves so that new selves could be made, selves of this place, this lineage.
Well, Dar Oakley knew; Dar Oakley understood.
For a sign, they cut off one of his ears, the right ear that the first son had once lost in a fight. From then on their name for him was One Ear, as it had been the name of the first.
When later he told Dar Oakley this story, he’d flick the stub of the ear with one of the remaining fingers of his right hand, and grin.
Because of those mangled fingers, he could never be much of a weapon wielder; but tall and brave and cool though he was, he had little interest in fighting anyway. He’d be a singer of songs and a storyteller. Among the hundreds of stories he could tell were ones he’d heard as a child in his first family, though he never revealed that. And one—the story of a Crow who went in search of Nothing—was one he’d learn from Dar Oakley. Dar Oakley, on his branch up above the children and the elders, would listen to it told, told again and changed, and he would not always know where the story ceased and he began, whether he heard it in Ka or acted it in Ymr.
That first winter after Dar Oakley found himself was a hard one. It began before the leaves fell and piled snow on snow that never melted. Dar Oakley and Gray Feather in the shelter of a dense Pine kept watch on the People trails, waiting for the hunters on their wide Bear-feet to come crossing over the snow, perhaps pulling a toboggan and a dead Moose the Crows might get something of. They sat together motionless, saving energy.
“What was his name?” Dar Oakley asked. It was in this season that Gray Feather’s mate had been lost.
“Darkwood,” she said. “It was the name his mother had, and others of his family.”
That was a difference here from the lands where Dar Oakley had first thought of names. There, every Crow had had his own. Here Gray Feather’s daughters had young with her name—Grayfeather—though they had no gray feather at all.
“I think,” she said, “if there is a name, a lost Crow is easier to remember.”
“I know,” he said. And yet it seemed to him that it might be as true to say that names make it easier to forget: the name remains and the rest is lost.
Snow drifted noiselessly through the Pine branches.
“Why do we have them, anyway?” Dar Oakley asked. “Names. Who thought of that?” He said it just to keep himself from telling his own tale, which would have set him apart from Gray Feather, from these Crows, his clan, whether they believed his story or didn’t, a story from elsewhere and far away.