She laughed, as though she now remembered that, and hadn’t till just then. “Well,” she said. “For some.”
“You are the oldest of all the Crows,” he said. “You were old when we mated, when we had young; when we carried the dead of those People to their right lands, and ate the flesh they left behind. You were old as old. I knew it then. I just—I didn’t know how to know it. But I did.”
“You,” she said, “are one smart Crow.”
“How did you know I was nearby here, and you could find me?” he asked. “Who in this country spoke my name to you?”
“Your name?”
“Ravens came to me, and they knew my name. They said they came from you.”
“No one ever spoke your name to me,” she said. “But I heard there was a Crow, of a lineage some days away, who taught Crows that the People could provide.”
“Provide?”
“That the greatest wealth for Crows was dead People, and to be friends with People, you must take part in their deaths; that’s how you get that wealth. I thought, I know that Crow; I know that old deceit.”
“No deceit,” Dar Oakley said.
“I sent messengers, daywise, darkwise, to say your name everywhere, and find who answered to it. That was many seasons past. I’ve waited.”
Messengers? Dar Oakley looked down the Beech where he and she sat. The crowd of Crows who’d ushered him here were staying below, at a distance, and yet keeping a watch, too, and listening. And he thought: Servitors. That’s what they were, her Servitors. He’d never known a Crow with more than one, or rarely two: a helper, feeder of young, sometime lover but not mate. His mother’s, long ago. If these sleek silent Crows were Servitors, then Kits had more Servitors than he could count. Had they, too, lived from then till now, only adding to their number? And himself, was he one?
“Well here I am,” he said. “Now tell me. What is it you wanted from me?”
She said nothing for a long time. He had begun to see that, beautiful and strong as she was, she was old, old in subtle ways: the sockets of her eyes were deep, the feathers of her head were thin. Her toes were long and twisted, like ancient vines.
“Look there,” she said. “The sun’s low; the days are growing shorter. The lineage will be gathering. Stay here by me, Dar Oakley, and when it’s morning I’ll answer you.”
Think of a Crow that goes on producing young each spring for a thousand years. Her children engender grandchildren for her, and those grandchildren great-grandchildren, and on and on even as she herself has more daughters and sons. At the end of those centuries how many direct descendants could she have? How large a flock that called her its mother or queen? Not all of them have followed her, surely; tens of thousands could have gone away, or been left behind as her flock migrated, spread out widely and mated with other populations and were alienated.
A thousand years? More, surely—I don’t know how many more; I don’t have facts to calculate with. Crows don’t count in thousands, or even in tens; Dar Oakley ceases to speak when I try to ask him to imagine how long it’s been, how long since he was born, how long she can have lived and crossed the world.
Why did she cross the world?
Was she in fact born among the American Crows, Corvus brachyrhyncos, and only after long years found her way west to live among the Eurasian Crows, Corvus corone? She was always different from them, Dar Oakley’s kind. Or was she born in the Old World, a sport, a genetic oddity, and were all the Crows of America her offspring, and looked like her? After a thousand generations, they’d have overcome any rivals, just by the numbers of them, and formed a species of their own.
Or maybe she was a plain Crow of Dar Oakley’s kind, who over time moved east across the world and finally over the ice bridge to the Western lands, following nomads; and in that time her shape and look changed, the iridescence of her plumage, the pitch of her call, just from living so long among the generations of Crows she met and mated with, before she turned back for some reason—restlessness, exile—to the lands where she was born, to find a mate in Dar Oakley.
How many mates before, how many since? How many were lost, died, grew old and failed, were caught and eaten, gone, never seen again? How often was she the one lost, though never lost to herself?
“You never died?” Dar Oakley asked her. “In all that time?”
“No.”
“But there are so many ways to die.”
“I’m not a hothead like you,” she said. “I made friends who helped me, watched me; mates who stayed by me.”
He dipped his head a little at that, and looked away.
Morning had come. Together they walked the ground, kicked up the yellow withering leaves and with their bills knocked on the fallen Beechnuts they found to get the meat; they walked the rocky lakeshore, picked at this and that. Always one Servitor or another watched them from not far off. Otherwise it was as it had been, only with everything different.
“So now tell me, Kits—you said you would. Why have you brought me here? And how is it that you can be here, so far away from where we were, and so long after?”
“Well, and how is it that you are, dear Crow?” she said. “Here among the living Crows, I mean; here in this season of the world.”
For a long moment he couldn’t remember; it was as though he’d suddenly gone blind. He couldn’t remember how he could be here, or what had happened between that time and now, or who he’d been before.
“I went into Ymr,” he said then. “I stole a thing there, the Most Precious Thing, and though I right away lost it, I have it still.”
“Ymr,” said Kits, as though she knew the word or the name and yet didn’t know it: the way we speak the name of something when we want someone to keep talking about it.
“Ymr,” Dar Oakley said. “It’s the realm where what People think is true is true.”
She laughed. “There is no true,” she said. “Only what happened, after it has.” She lifted her ashy head; her bill was parted, her eye was dry. “I stole it too,” she said.
“You stole it? From what being, where?”
“From around the neck of a People child. In another land far from here.” She stooped to peck at something, discarded it. “A little stone. I wanted it and I took it.”
“And did it,” Dar Oakley said, remembering suddenly, “speak to you?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
A little stone, strung on a red cord around a People child’s fat neck. A thing she couldn’t keep from looking at and spying on. Did it catch the light like a chip of quartz, was it gold, or worked silver? No, it wasn’t. It was a plain little yellow-gray stone, but when the baby sat in the dirt or sucked at its mother’s breast, the stone seemed to glow and fade, as though restless; it seemed to be seeking escape—how could that be?
So she stole it. It was nothing; why should the child have it, why would People miss it? She settled on the child’s stomach as it slept in the sun, and with a quick bite she tore the bead from the string and was away, hearing the child wail and the mother cry out below.
She found a hiding place for it, and when that place seemed insecure, she found another—as any Crow would do. She went often to visit it, look at it with this eye and then with that, turn and turn it, and yes, it was as though she heard it speak or sob in words she didn’t know, for she’d take it up in her bill to comfort or soothe it somehow.
On a day when she was holding it that way, she looked up to see a People woman staring at her. A People woman, but not like others: tiny, squat, toadlike. How could it have snuck up on her, a Crow, without her noticing? The woman crept forward, holding out her hand with a grasping motion, eyes fixed on Kits. It was clear what she wanted, but not why. Kits hopped back, somehow unable to fly—the little woman’s stare held her to the ground. But when the creature came close enough to leap swiftly for her, Kits was so startled that she snapped her bill—and the little stone went down her throat.