He tried to explain the plan to Father, but that bird was too busy to listen or comprehend, and anyway he’d never visited that place. The Servitor was as always doubtful. So on a thundery, humid day he set off alone, flying down the long demesne and crying out, Come on! Come on! I have something! Follow me! A few young Crows came after him, some dropping away when nothing immediately promising appeared, but a few more joined, and in a ragged crowd they went out the long but by now well-known way to the place of the Lake Beings.
They could see even from far off that something had changed there.
Some stretches of the long slope of flat land between their funny shelters and the lake had been scored in long, straight lines, the earth turned out in running heaps like huge molehills—what was that? Some of the beings scratched with sticks at the scored earth, digging for who knew what—but as Dar Oakley’s gang passed over, they looked up to see, making that indicating gesture; then they threw down their stick-things and followed the Crows, as though joining their progress toward the settlement.
It seemed to be empty. The barking beasts, the tenders of fire, the young, were nowhere to be seen. Some few who might be elders were on their way together toward something beyond, where now the Crows could see the mass of the settlers were gathered, and from where strange noises were arising. The Crows gathered calling in the high branches of the Oak grove away from the settlement, from where with Crow sight they could discern what was happening, but not why. From away off billwise, many new beings of that kind were coming, all in a crowd, an alarming number of them. That noise the Crows had heard was coming from them, a noise they made by clashing together the things they carried, things bright as flames when they caught the sun; they made a high whine with their mouths, or was it with something stuck in their mouths? They came on toward the settlers, who faced them and made the same noises themselves.
“What is it?” the Crows around Dar Oakley cried. “What are those? What are they doing?”
Dar Oakley didn’t know. “Watch and you’ll see,” he said.
“See what, fledgling?” a Crow near him said.
It was the Vagrant. Dar Oakley’s eye-haws flashed, but the Vagrant only becked in mock deference at him.
“Say, look now,” Dar Oakley said.
The new ones had come with their own rolling carrier, pulled by a sleek black high-headed animal. It was pulled out before them all, the being carried in it standing tall, bearing nothing but a green branch of Oak. The settlers pulled their own carrier out from amid them, which bore one of their own—it was that white-haired one who couldn’t walk, legs thin as a Deer’s forelegs. He stretched out his hands and began to call toward the newcomers—high, piercing sounds changing rapidly in pitch and tone, as varied as birdsong. Somehow it stilled all those others in their advancing. He reached out toward them and the ones most forward stepped back, as though they feared his long, strong arms could cross the wide space between them and take hold of them.
“We’ll go closer,” Dar Oakley called. He’d never known of a being not a bird who had a song, if a song was what this was. “Let’s go!”
The others complained and hesitated, but they followed, without really knowing why. Everyone on the plain below turned to watch them come over, and the Singer gestured toward them as though to draw them close. They clustered on a high outcrop of bare rock, so near the crowd of beings that the teeth in their mouths could be seen when they opened them wide to yell.
For a long time nothing more happened. The Singer on this side and the one with the Oak branch on the other took turns crying out in long, lilting phrases, the sound of Oak Branch low and rumbling, the Singer high. Far off behind the newcomers, well away from the face-off, were others, were they their females? And children, too, and fires smoldering—how long had they all been squatting there? Back at the settlement, children and many females hid behind a high palisade of sticks that surrounded their shelters, a new thing not there before.
There came a huge roar as some very large ones came forth from each side, black hair to their middles and long slasher-cutter things in both hands but none of the trappings and wrappings the others had, their sex visible. They strutted in the wide-open space between the two gatherings, loud-hailing and cursing and mocking their opposites like fighting Crows, stamping on the ground like rutting Elk in combat, all the while coming closer and closer. And then something began to happen so hard to understand, so startling, that several Crows arose, to see it better or to flee it. The naked two-legs rushed together, raising and whacking their opposites with the things in their hands. Instantly blood began to flow, actually leaping from the fighters, as all the rest cried out in joy. They cheered and pointed at the Crows aloft, even as their champions clashed together. Then everyone joined in, colliding and yelling and beating at others with their weapons.
Weapons. For it was a battle, and the Crows themselves were in and of that battle—a word they’d only later learn to use, a word that would afterward be spoken among them sometimes in exultation, sometimes in reverence (or as close to such a feeling as Crows ever come) because of the change that it brought to their lives, a change never after to be annulled, not for a thousand years, and which would make them rich and populous, feared and honored. On this day, the Crows of the region joined the history of People, and their own history began.
“Well, look at that,” the Vagrant said.
In the midst of the tumult, one of the big naked ones with a cry had driven his weapon deeply into the other’s gut. The blood spurted just as the Deer’s had done on that winter evening beneath the trees where the Crows roosted. The big newcomer fell to his knees, clutching at the thing stuck in him, but then sprawling headlong and heedless.
“He’s killed,” said Dar Oakley.
It was true. The one from Dar Oakley’s side (as he thought of them) hadn’t just driven the other away, hadn’t defeated or discouraged him, he’d killed him dead where he stood. What were they doing? It was apparent that the new ones had come to take the others’ freehold, and the ones in possession were fighting them off just the way a Crow family would fight off invaders, crying at them and threatening and even tangling with them, the invaders doing the same. But it wasn’t like Crows at all. The defenders fought against the others as against interlopers, but they killed them like prey.
“Look how he’s ripped that one open.”
“I think he wants to tear his head off.”
All day they contested, all against all, till the sun moved to stand over the darkwise hills. More and more went down, blood-covered, dead or nearly dead. The Crows leapt from rock to rock or took to the air to see, unable to guess what would happen next. At last the newcomers began to retreat. Seeing that, the settlers—anyway, all those not themselves killed or hampered by wounds or exhaustion—roared all together and ran after them, flourishing the bloodied things they carried, the weapons.
Strangely, Oak Branch and the Singer stood their ground, as they had all along, though their horses shied and cried out and shook the carriers now and then. The fighters of both sides went around them, never touching them.
The settlers didn’t pursue the fleeing ones far, only as far as to be sure—like a mob of Crows pursuing a discouraged Hawk—that they wouldn’t turn back to fight again, and yes, they were fleeing in a ragged line back to where their females and their fires were, done with fighting. Oak Branch calmly turned his cart around to follow them, unafraid. From out of the palisaded settlement behind, the females and young were coming out, the danger past.