“What will they do with them all?” asks the Crow Toebone.
“Wait and see,” Dar Oakley says, as though he knows.
What they do is to carry them a ways away, not far, to where other carts are coming with more dead, and where other People (mostly the darker-colored kind common in these regions, Dar Oakley sees) are digging a wide, shallow cut in the earth. The wagons stop; the dead are carried out, stiffened in death or flopping will-lessly, and each is wrapped in a coarse sheet and placed crosswise in the trench. Pretty soon there are no more sheets and the dead are put in without them, their heads without eyes (that’s the Crows’ doing) turned to the sky. As they are laid down, other People move along the trench, shoveling back in the dirt that they dug out. Other diggers lengthen the cut to accommodate more. Crows look down on wrapped bodies covered with dirt, then more not dirt-covered; then not wrapped but bare, then empty trench awaiting more, and the diggers continuing. One of these diggers can be seen to faint, or die, falling down for no reason. When night comes and Crows depart, the work goes on by the light of torches.
It’s all right with Crows. Even when these buried ones are subtracted from all the dead of the Battle, still those who lie out ungathered and uncovered, and those whom a few shovels of earth can’t shelter from Crows and others, those who are left behind when the living People give up the work and march away—they are more than the whole nation of Crows and all other eaters of the dead can ever finish. Dar Oakley, surveying what the People have made of the Future, how they’ve slung Death over a whole valley floor for others to live on, not for a day but a whole season, thinks of saying to the Crows, This is good. This is what they should do. And I knew that they would. He’d like to say it, but it’s not true, and he can’t.
When they returned to their summer demesne up billwise, the Crows told and retold what all of them already knew: what they had seen, how much they’d eaten, how fat they got, the wonder of it, like nothing ever seen before, People flesh, Horse flesh, dead Dogs even that the People shot when the Dogs tried to get in on the wealth. The few Crows who had wintered nearer home also listened, annoyed at the stories finally, Yes, yes, we heard you, flesh too plentiful to eat; and they vowed to go farther this winter and see what there was to see, get what there was to get.
“It can’t be they’d ever do such a thing again, though,” one said to Dar Oakley. (She was a Cherry, and thus a descendant of his own, though she didn’t know that.) “Would they?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Dar Oakley said. “You never know, about People. You can never come to the end of what they’ll do, or stop doing.”
And when the cold weather came and again Crows went down that way, it was the same. By then the Crows of that land, Na Cherry’s old flock and its neighbors, had also discovered the riches; through the spring and summer they’d learned to keep an eye out for ranks of People all moving together to where the killing would be done. Beat of boots on the earth. The local Crows would keep a distance but never lose sight of them. Now and then one of the dark hats would turn and a white face look up at them in fear or hatred.
Death-birds.
The great encampments like the one the Crows first saw, the gray tents and the massed People all dressed alike, the campfires multiplying to the distance and the mounted fighters rushing here and there—they became less common. Fewer of the great black guns that threw the balls, and more men on Horses fighting others on Horses, the clashes short and furious. There were barns burned by night and People hanged from trees and cattle shot dead and cut up for the fighters to eat and the remainder left to rot. This sort of fighting Dar Oakley recognized. He had seen the like, in other places and times; had seen victors cut away the ears and other parts of the defeated to keep or to wear, as these did; had seen them bury their own fighters but leave their enemies to rot and to Crows, as vengeance, so that they might never rest in death. Yet sometimes now they must abandon their own dead too where they lay, both Horses and People, and ride on. It was all normal, long-standing; Dar Oakley forbore even to explain it to the others.
One thing that was new was the single fighter who with a long gun climbs into a tree and waits there hidden, watching. When a number of fighters from the other side come near and dismount to look around through their black tubes or study papers or rest, the shooter in the tree lifts the gun with slow care, aims, and fires. One of the group falls; the rest then drop down too to hide, not knowing just where the shot came from; when they can, they creep fast away. Most often the dead one is left behind. Crows learn to watch and wait for this, calling others—come here, look in that tree crotch, there—which obviously angers the one in the tree. The hubbub will draw the eyes of his prey to him. Get! Get! he whispers at them fiercely, yet staying as still as any Owl.
The Crows don’t care. There was always further wealth to be found, that was the main thing, no end to it: obscured in the woods and in the long grass, muddied in the drying creek beds, having lain there while Crows ate elsewhere. To find it Crows just followed the Pigs of the farms, who nosed it out from the undergrowth and rooted in the rotting cloth. The local Crows could afford to be generous, invited Dar Oakley and the transients to begin, Have at it, you’re welcome, no, no, you first. When two Crows out of lifelong habit started to squabble over some piece of cadaver, the others laughed until the squabblers recollected where they were and what they had. And where there is Plenty there is Peace. At evening they all gathered, laughing, heads shiny with fat, reeking of the rich smell of death. A dozen new names were earned for feats of gluttony never known before. The farmer-People of that region would never forget their exulting.
Unlike migrating Blackbirds or Swallows, the Crows went home in slow stages, small bands, foraging and resting or ranging wide as they went. Often a Crow would find herself alone, out of range of Crow calls she knew. Dar Oakley was alone when he first sensed the ones who accompanied the flock, moving over the ground below, going the way the Crows went. It wasn’t any noise they made that drew his attention, or that they appeared along open People roads—they could actually be seen anywhere, and were silent. It took Dar Oakley a time of watching for them, or seeking their presence, to understand who they were: People fighters.
“Are they following us?” he asked another of his clan, who happened to be by. “Are they going where we’re going?”
“Who?” said the other, lifting her wings and looking around for a threat. “Where?”
Dar Oakley tried to locate one to show her but somehow couldn’t, though a moment earlier several had certainly been there, passing through the thin Aspens over the fallen leaves. The other Crow gave him a doubtful look and went on.
He couldn’t really see them: he just knew they were there. As he had known the clans of the elder People who long before had walked darkwise following One Ear. The harder he looked, the less he saw them, and the more of them he knew were there. Whether they were all the dead fighters, or only the dead that the Crows had tasted; if they followed to claim something from the Crows, or to revenge themselves on them, Dar Oakley didn’t know. He didn’t know if they bore the wounds they had taken, he didn’t know if they went in the clothes they’d worn or without any. What do you see? the Crows asked Dar Oakley, watching him twitch and start. But he couldn’t say.