Oh, they were lords then as they hadn’t been in any place before, their grand knitted confederacy grown huge over time and strengthened with pacts and agreements (unspoken, of course, but firm nevertheless) in which Cooperation ruled. Maybe they were hated, but who cared? There was Plenty everywhere, a Land of Plenty such as he had once promised to Crows, and no need to fight, no need to have firm friends and relations who would fight beside you. Where there is Plenty, there is Peace. Crows flourished as never before. They yakked all day in triumph, they “darkened the sky” in their thousands, there was almost no one left in these environs but the People and they. There were Crows now who lived until they died simply from being very old. Dar Oakley the oldest of them all, of course, watching those around him age while he somehow did not. How was it that Kits had grown so old in her long time alive and he hadn’t? She never died until she died forever: were his deaths then for him a refreshment, a bath of water or smoke that kept him a Crow of middle age?
“Hungry?” cried one stout, bright-eyed female at him as he alighted on the mountain at morning. Crows these days grew big—the old folks marveled at their own offspring, giant louts, strapping fellows, fatsos.
“Never not,” Dar Oakley called back, and they both laughed at the old joke.
Big and well fed they were, but not all were well. Near where Dar Oakley sought breakfast, a Crow was messing with a broken box of some kind, plucking at its flaps and sides to get it open. Dar Oakley came closer in brief hops, making careful gestures of inquiry, but the fellow paid him no attention. Now Dar Oakley could see that his eyes were clouded, as though the inner haws were drawn across them, though they weren’t. A gum leaked from an eye-corner; his head seemed ashy, unclean, and his bill hung open to get breath.
Sick. Many now were sick, young and old, despite how the flocks were flourishing. Dar Oakley felt an impulse to shun this one, but the box he was messing with was intriguing. It’s hard for a Crow to resist a thing in hiding, and city Crows know that many bags and boxes have good things inside them. Dar Oakley took the box lid in his bill and tugged, rowing backward with his wings to get purchase, and so did the other. Whatever was in the box was heavy and smelled worth uncovering. Crows may have a limited sense of smell, but this odor they know.
“There,” said the sick Crow, though the lid hadn’t given way. He pecked at it but let Dar Oakley take over; every little while he looked upward for threats or interference, looked daywise, then darkwise—there was nothing to see, but Crows can’t help doing that. The box lid came away. Dar Oakley staggered a step or two with it, his bill impaled on it, trying to shake it off.
“Well, well,” said the sick Crow. “This is a nice find.” Other Crows were circling in, curious, alerted by his interest. None seemed to know any of the others—made no signs of it—but there was no contesting.
“Lucky,” one cried.
Dar Oakley stepped closer to the box. Crows were muscling in, heedless of precedence, delighted. In the box was a People’s infant, partly wrapped in a cloth. Dead.
“Pretty fresh, too,” said a Crow.
The skin of the thing was blue, its face seeming shrunken like a winter apple, eyes squeezed shut. How long was it since Dar Oakley had seen one, much less tasted one? The odor of it stronger too now that the box was opened, an odor so familiar to him yet so remote. Something stirred within him at the sight and smell of it: lengths of something unfurled within him that had taken a long time to furl. It was as though the dead child before him had startled awake others, others he had seen and known and eaten of, alongside other Crows, themselves all long dead, their faces forgotten. Who were they all? What had they been to him? For a moment the stained box was bottomless, and beneath this baby lay many more, back down to the beginning.
The nearby Crows warily eyed Dar Oakley’s stance of silent immobility, not knowing what it intimated, and Dar Oakley, seeing that, becked with sarcastic deference. The sick Crow—the others kept a distance from him, as Dar Oakley had done—lifted himself with effort to the box’s edge and settled on the infant body. His bill with a sharp thrust pierced through an eye, an easy morsel to get first. That female who’d joshed Dar Oakley alighted, nodded at the food, and at him. “Go ahead,” she said. “You’re welcome.”
“No,” Dar Oakley said. “No, none for me.”
“Not so hungry after all,” she said, and laughed. That sharp bright eye a little cruel. She knew him for an outsider. The sick one went to probing the eyehole for the brain behind.
Dar Oakley hopped back and rose away from them, turning as he rose to avoid hungry birds coming in to feed. Rose, above the mountain.
So long since he had seen one dead: and how long since one so young? The People, in the latter time of Dar Oakley’s knowing them, had come to hide their dead, keep them close, case them in strong cases and not so much as look at them when they carried them out and put them, case and all, into the earth. Not so, once: he could feel in memory the many that had been just abandoned on the earth all bare, dead infants left behind or left beside their unburied kin, their mothers. That was during the People’s great dying: they were the sick, the murdered. Before that was the time—the length of it opened within or beyond him—when the dead, laid with care on the ground, young or old, would be watched over through a number of days and nights before being put into the earth or the fire with songs and keening; or lifted up in their bright wrappings to woven beds in the trees or on the high ledges so the Crows and others could probe the flesh and let their spirits out. That had been good eating.
If in Ymr as it was now they had given up all that, forgotten it, no longer cared even to hide their dead away, then it almost seemed that Ymr might be ending, vast as it was. Ka, too, was vast, greater than ever; the demesnes of flocks and the old family freeholds of Dar Oakley’s long-ago youth melted now into one another and vanished, no borders, nowhere now without its complement of Crows.
Ymr was vast but thin. They threw away their young now. They had become the ghosts they used to fear.
Well, perhaps it wasn’t so. Dar Oakley went higher over the mountain; the People and the Crows, the scavengers and the feeders, the rising smoke and the machines, changed in his sight as the folds of the mountain closed below. Surely it wasn’t so—it was only that he had seen so much. His soul had darkened.
Whatever the case, he wanted no more of it. He was now as Kits was at the last: done with it, done with Ymr, with sickness and Plenty.
Below him as he passed were the long strings of People’s places, their roads and wire-strung poles, the stone fields where the cars were parked in flocks, buildings alight in the dawn where who was doing what. Not far off and rising up more sharply than any mountain stood the city center. Crows living large in its streets and trees, feasting on its wealth, side by side with People. Crows below him too, black against the morning, on wires, on rooftops, cruising the earth in numbers.
He turned billwise with steadying wing beats. He had an idea—an idea that he now seemed to have been nurturing for a long time—about a land he might go to, a land that lies far that way, or ought to; where winters are white and long, and Ravens are lords. Use his old skills again, in a place where such skills would still be useful. He didn’t know if such a land could be reached, or if it would lie within Ka—that is, if Crows could be found there.
A place where he too could learn at last to die forever. Or if not that, forget.
It would be a long way to go alone, certainly, with all the dangers and the long solitudes to endure. He had been often and long alone, here and there, in Ka and Ymr, but Crows may be many, Crows may be few, but one Crow alone is no Crows, that’s the truth. What succor would he find as he went?