“But you see, what I’ve always been so sorry for—I never thanked that Kingfisher for taking me out of the water. And now I can’t go back, because I promised I never would.”
“Ah,” Dar Oakley said.
“I can’t go back,” she said, and turned an eye on him. “Back under the water of that lake. Not I.”
Dar Oakley considered the sleek black bird, who seemed not in the least distressed by her difficulty. He had no intention of asking her another thing about it, since her reply would be obvious. “Getting cooler,” he said instead. “Let’s you and me go find something good to eat.”
Soon enough summer had passed, and the rain and the gray clouds came over the southern lands, reminding him of his first home beyond the daywise sea. When Dar Oakley’s relatives, migrating from the snowy north, began to appear, they were surprised to discover him there—they thought for sure he’d been caught and eaten. Now it was her turn to stay away, the strangers having a bad reputation among her flock, such as gypsies anywhere can have: as though thievery and a black eye on the main chance were qualities only of others from elsewhere.
“So you’ve been here all along?” one of his kin asked Dar Oakley.
“Yes.”
“Good living here?”
“Oh, pretty good.”
“These Crows hereabouts are tough, aren’t they?”
“Like a lot of Crows back home,” Dar Oakley said, which got a laugh.
“Well,” said the other, whose name Dar Oakley can’t recall. “I won’t be having much to do with them anyway.”
“Nor they with you.”
“But you got on well, it seems,” said the other, in something like suspicion. And Dar Oakley took a stance—I’ve seen him do it—a stance that has the same uses, I think, as a shrug.
She didn’t see him much in that season, but sought him out in late winter when her time had begun; he made himself easy to find, in a place away from others. Because he’d spent a year in this place, because of her nearness, he was in the same state this spring as she. They faced each other as new persons, though not as strangers. I wonder if it’s like turning back into a teenager, once in every year.
He groomed her, and she allowed him to.
“So these tasks,” he said.
“These tasks,” she said. “You know about them.”
“The Kingfisher,” he said.
Her eyes closed, in thought or pleasure or both. She named the other tasks, and the list seemed to differ from the one she’d given him before.
“Well, I think I could do these things,” he said. “I know I could, though I’ve never tried any of them. I’ve never met a Kingfisher.”
“No,” she said.
“But you know,” he said. “I’m very old.”
“Old,” she said.
“I don’t suppose,” he said, “that you’d want to change them a little because of that, or remove one or two?”
“No,” she said.
He bent his head before her; she took the feathers of his head in her bill one at a time, and cleaned each one. “Well, anyway,” he said, “you might think about how long they’re going to take me. If I’m ever able to do them all. Which here I swear I will try to do.”
She withdrew from him, turned away, and back again: that dance.
“It might take me so long, though,” he said, “that you’d give up on me. Forget that somewhere I’m still at it.”
“I won’t,” she said.
They were quite close. He turned with her, becking up and down.
“I just want you to know,” he said, his head now alongside hers, eye to her eye, “that if some quick-wing youngster should set forth and do all you ask in a single season, I’d understand—I mean I would if I ever learned of it—that you’d have to choose him. That you should.”
“All right,” she said. She had bent low, wings outstretched, almost sweeping the earth.
“But still I will do those things.”
“Kingfisher,” she said. Her tail rose, spread.
“Every one. I’ve sworn.”
Then there was no more need for tasks, as Dar Oakley knew: poor dead Kits had taught him in the long-before, when she’d chosen him though he’d done none of the tasks she set for him. They were never meant to be done, only accepted, but accepted for real, with all your heart as Dar Oakley would learn to say. That was what no suitor of this youngling had guessed; and Dar Oakley couldn’t know if it was so for every courted female, or if it was only so for some—those like her, black her; didn’t know if she knew that the things she asked for had no value, not for her or him, they were nothing, had anyway been done already in the very naming of them, her to him, him to her: Kingfisher, moonlight flight, People’s oxcart, Fisher cat, mountain quartz. Because now they were aloft together, a blur of wings and tails, and then aground again, all accomplished.
One thing more.
“They’ll hate you,” she said. “My kin. They hate all of you.”
“Fly away with me,” he said. “Billwise to my demesne.”
“They’ll hate me there. They will.”
“No,” Dar Oakley said. “I’m Old Crow in that land, the biggest of Biggers. No one would dare.”
She moved beside him. “Dai,” he whispered to her, “ndai, daya, na.”
“What’s it like there?” she asked.
“It’s good. The best land.”
“Are there cherries there?”
“Cherries?”
“I love cherries,” she said.
“Na Cherry,” he said.
“What?”
“Na Cherry,” he said, and now he was close as close to her again. “Your name.”
“We don’t like her,” a big female said. “Your mate. She’s not one of us. We hate her.”
In the greening trees of his demesne, Dar Oakley could perceive Crows he hadn’t particularly taken notice of before, mostly males—the females were already sitting eggs. They regarded him. More were coming in.
“She’s fine,” he said, and stepped closer to Na Cherry. “Don’t worry about her.”
“We’re not worried,” said the female, who as far as Dar Oakley knew had not chosen or inherited a name. “We don’t like her.”
“It’s all right,” Na Cherry said. “I’m all right.” Crows of this place had dismantled the first nest she’d begun, and the next as well. Dar Oakley’d driven them off, told her they were jokers, harmless.
“It’s not all right,” the big female said. “She has to go. We don’t want it.”
“You can stay,” a Bigger whom Dar Oakley knew called out. “She has to go.”
“It’s our country,” called a voice from the trees. “It’s for us and ours.”
Dar Oakley roused, his plumage rose, he grew in size; the Crows in the trees did the same. Several dropped to branches closer to him and to Na Cherry. Defiance, he perceived, might not be the right choice. He’d known times and places where such things as seemed about to occur here and now really had occurred: he knew what a mob of Crows could do, would do if so moved. He and she could turn and fly, but that has a certain effect on a mob—as not only Crows know.
“Your country?” he said, not loud but definite. “I led you to this country, long ago. I was first among us then, before any of you were born. We met Crows here and made nests among them. Mated with them, male and female.” He thought that none of them remembered this, that few enough even remembered being told the tale. They wouldn’t have dared censure him this way back then. Had his kind grown more contentious, intolerant, and he’d not noticed it?