“Tell me this,” Dar Oakley called to them all. “Tell me that you, any of you, would give up a mate.” There were calls and noise all around, objections made. “No, no,” Dar Oakley said. “Just tell me. Or what if it was you ordered to go, leave your mate and your freehold. Tell me you’d do it.”
For a moment that seemed to still them, but Crows won’t ponder hypotheticals for long, and clamor returned. Dar Oakley could feel Na Cherry tremble beside him, her wings taut. “Wait, wait,” he said. “Stop.” He put all his old authority into the word. “Stop now. Listen.”
One by one they shut up.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said. “We’ll go on. We’ll go to a place I know of, far from here. A place not in Ka at all.”
Not in Ka? Mocking laughter, cries of Go, go! and some aggressive shifting of places, putting the big Crows closer to Dar Oakley and his mate. Not in Ka? Wherever we are is in Ka!
“Oh yes,” Dar Oakley said. “I know a place.”
What place, what place? He told them: a place where food is endless, always more coming to be, where Crow young keep coming forth, where there is more life-sustaining death than all of us, no, many more than all of us again and again can ever use—but only coming into being as we need it.
Much hilarity and denouncing for this, but some old Crows, alpha females, heads of families, stayed quiet. “Where is it, this place?” said one, and some others took up that call.
“Think I’d tell you?” Dar Oakley said. “Go find it for yourselves. If you’re lucky, we’ll see you there.”
This was too much. Cries and demands, Tell! Tell! but Dar Oakley stayed quiet. He could feel Na Cherry shrink against him. All she had for assurance was stories, stories he’d told of tight spots he’d got out of, lands he’d seen.
“All right, all right!” he called as loudly as he could. “I’ll tell you what. We’ll stay here and you go.”
He waited for this to shut them up. It didn’t quite. “Yes!” he said. “Let us two take a small freehold hereabouts, say over daywise, beyond those hills, where once we all flocked. Small, a small freehold there, out of the way. And I’ll tell you everything I know of this land I’ve found.”
They were all listening now. They might still feel murderous, but he thought they wouldn’t do murder now. “All right,” he said. “This land. It’s easy to get there. Nearer than you can know. So close you can reach it by not going there at all. In fact, that’s the only way to reach it.”
“What?” shrieked a big female, the same one who’d first sentenced Na Cherry to death or exile.
“This land,” Dar Oakley said, “is not like other lands. It’s like no other land. Other lands you go to; this land comes to you. You get there by staying where you are.” The tension in the trees was supplanted by head-twitching waves of curiosity and doubt. “You don’t believe me? Haven’t I been the traveler? Didn’t I carry your fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers to lands of wealth? I can’t lie; you know I can’t.”
Dar Oakley took a brief flight to a farther branch, and no one challenged him. Na Cherry hurried to stand beside him. “This land’s for you alone,” he said. “It’s coming. Watch for signs of it. We won’t be there.”
They weren’t satisfied. If this land comes to us, why hasn’t it come before? Because you never wanted to go there, and didn’t know you could. If we don’t like this land, how can we return from it? You wouldn’t want to, ever.
Finally, silence.
“Well,” Dar Oakley said. “Good-bye, then.”
He dropped from the branch, and he and Na Cherry were flying. Not fleeing, flying. They heard calls and queries and disputing behind them, but they sailed on as though everything was settled. They went and took that little freehold over the eastern hills, and built a new nest there just in time, and Na Cherry laid her first three green-and-black eggs. The freehold was at the edge of the flock’s demesne but definitely within it, within the greater company of Crows and their patrolling. It reminded Dar Oakley of that newcomer’s freehold on the marches of the demesne where he’d been born; of his sisters, of his mother and her Servitor, of the Vagrant. The memories gathered within him without his choosing; it was like being lifted effortlessly on a thermal. Watching over Na Cherry in their nest in a great resinous Pine, he wasn’t made to think of Kits or any other mate of the many he had had, but of his mother sitting her eggs and talking to him of his own days in the nest.
In summer he watched Na Cherry with their gawky young, their breasts still barred in gray, as she took them out in the world. See there, children, what is it? It is a dead calf of the People’s over the hill. No one’s discovered it! We call, Ka! Ka! to see if others will come to the find. Call, children! Now we may wait and see, or shall we go down alone? Yes, let’s. Your father will keep watch, and wait. Now do as I do. We’ll begin, children, with the eyes.
Na Cherry never lost the soft articulation that had made her a shunned alien once, but the others ceased to be offended and in time hardly noticed it. Some of the younger males even took a mating-time interest in her, and one or two applied to serve her—but Dar Oakley, tolerant old Crow though he’d become, would have none of that. She lived long, in Crow years; her and Dar Oakley’s children eventually numbered in the dozens, and many lived. Of all the mates that Dar Oakley’s had, Na Cherry was his the longest; when she died, he’d lived beside her for so many seasons that he had almost forgotten that it was possible for her to die—and impossible for him to die and not to live on without her.
He doesn’t know where or how—that’s common enough. Her eyes had dimmed—she could have mistaken a thorn hedge for a sheltering brake when pursued. Or struck a tree with a wing and hidden herself to heal, and was found by a Fox, a Marten. (He looked in all the hiding places they both had committed to memory, and found neither her nor Crow feathers in any.) Taken by a Hawk, a Redtail or a Falcon; by an Owl when he and she were apart at night. Shot or snared for sport by a People child, the remains of her claimed by scavengers. All these things he pondered. The light bodies of birds are quickly consumed by death and bugs. Everyone knows.
It was a long year. Dar Oakley remained on his and Na Cherry’s freehold till autumn days grew short; sometimes his sons and daughters came to see him, asked him for stories and wisdom, but he didn’t have much to offer them beyond gratitude for being there. He flocked as usual with the others in the great roost when the cold grew deeper; it didn’t matter if he wanted company or not, there was safety in numbers when predators grew bold.
But he didn’t travel south with them that winter.
He ceased eating, or almost ceased; he’d made no vow, just didn’t feel compelled to. It seemed that in Na Cherry’s death, the deaths of all those he loved were contained: the nestlings washed out of nests in rainstorms, old friends who took fool chances, mates leaving at morning and not returning at night. They seemed, dreadfully, dead but not gone at all, not one of them; not vanished, not from him even if from Ka.
He huddled skinny and cold on a high rock, looking out over snow and white sky.
Was it really true that after death there was nothing left of a Crow, nothing but bones and feathers? Would that be worse than to know that somewhere, somehow, Na Cherry was still alive, still herself, that all those he’d loved over long years were too, in a place to which he could never go, and out of which they could never come?