And Dar Oakley and the Crows looked down on the greatest bounty that any band of eaters of dead flesh had ever seen.
If all his family, and half the flock to which they belonged, were to eat here for days and days, they would never get it all before it spoiled even beyond a Crow’s taste for carrion. A weird feeling of repletion such as he had never felt heaved Dar Oakley’s stomach and passed. He flew high over the battlefield and began to call with all his might: Look, look! Come here where I am! Come now, come quick! He cried it and cried it, and the Crows who’d witnessed the battle cried it, and from the grove where the more timid of the Crows had lurked it was taken up: Come here, come on! Dar Oakley heard it repeated, and he cried it louder.
Over the flock’s range the call was relayed, reaching inward a great distance, one Crow handing it on to others, who handed it on to more: something extraordinary was happening there where the calls came from. Crows not sitting in nests began to leave their family freeholds and move toward their neighbor’s that lay in that direction, which they found undefended, because the family there had left too, winging toward the summons; and thus the families’ holdings collapsed one after the other as the Crows joined into a mass, going to the lake and the moorland.
By the following day they were clamoring together in sight of the fields where the dead beings lay, but they didn’t know what to do next. Astonished at the wealth spread out, almost unable to comprehend it, yet still afraid of the living ones, everyone waited for someone else to do something. Go, go, they cried, and no one went. Be careful, be careful, they called, and We’ll be careful, watch us, the bravest called back as they dodged and hovered over the bounty and away again, no way of knowing how much of it the victors and killers would want for themselves.
But those strange beings, they made no claim to the enemy, they only investigated them, kicked them over. Those that were alive but too hurt to flee they killed outright. Their females went among the dead attackers and—no, didn’t disembowel them or cut them in parts as they had the Deer in winter. They tore from them those trappings neither pelt nor skin, and sometimes stabbed them, dead as they were; they chopped pieces from them, from between their legs, but then only threw them aside as though they had chosen the wrong parts and didn’t want them after all.
“Maybe they won’t eat their own kind,” Dar Oakley said. “A Crow wouldn’t.”
“No,” said the Vagrant. “Never.”
“But a Crow would never kill another Crow.”
“Well,” said the Vagrant. “Hardly ever.”
Dar Oakley could bear no more. What was a skinny nestling, a baby Rabbit even, compared to this? And he was hungry, hungry! Almost without willing it he lifted from the rocks and coasted toward the meat all splayed and red. He cried to the others to follow, not daring to look back and see if they did, but when he settled beside the nearest dead one, there were wings around him. Three, five, more. None of the two-legs threatened them or appeared jealous; indeed some pointed at them and made a wavering cry that seemed to be welcoming. The smell of blood and opened gut in the sun was terrific. Flies were gathering. Keeping an eye out, Dar Oakley chanced a bite, a rip of the gashed flesh of one, the fat beneath. Nothing happened, no objection, and he jumped up on the body to get more. Look at the teeth in its mouth, amazing; it took daring to pluck at the soft and swollen tongue.
Now the flock descended, seeing that the early arrivers were not chased off. The timid ones settled and then arose when the weapon-wielders turned their way, but were soon enough partaking, ignoring everything else, meat-drunk, squabbling with friends and foes over bits as though unable to see how much there was. Dar Oakley, gulping and choking, laughed to see it. A Crow would tear off a great gobbet and fly off to hide it beneath the bushes, cache it there for later, and another would follow to catch him at it and steal it for herself—that was always the way of it, of course, but it made no sense now, just eat till your crop was stuffed.
There was one curious thing. The People cared not at all that the Crows dug through the bodies of their opponents, but if a Crow should fall upon or even come near a body that had been one of their own, they’d drive her off with sticks and cries. They pulled their own dead together, laid coverings over them, stayed by them as though they weren’t dead at all but still at threat of harm or insult. Crying aloud perhaps to keep Crows off. That was hard to understand, but hardly mattered.
Night fell. Bills bloody and breast feathers slick with fat, the weary Crows headed nestward bearing as much as they could carry, or they went to the near trees to sleep, too full to fly very far. Through the night fires flared amid the dwellings, and the two-legs could be heard mourning or rejoicing or crying in pain, it was hard to tell which.
Of course they wouldn’t eat their own dead. Ravens didn’t; neither did Wolves. Why not? It was the way they were. But why did these beings drive off others, Crows, who came to eat them? Not from all, only from their own? A Crow would always cry out on a Hawk caught on the dead body of another Crow, whether old friend or old foe, surely. But still that Crow would be eaten, by one being or another, and who could take it amiss?
Dar Oakley pondered.
Why did they tend to their dead and guard them as they did?
Maybe they couldn’t tell that those ones were dead.
Maybe it was their fate, what they must do because they must, like it or not. It was likely so, yet as when his father had told him of his own fate, Dar Oakley was not reconciled, and did not assent.
Through the next many days Crows went back and forth over the distance to the nests, taking away what they could and coming back for more—filling their nestlings’ small pink maws so full they topped up with meat as flower-cups top up with rain. Even more came as bodies burst open and flesh softened in odorous decay, the way the Crows like it. Among the Crows were Father and Younger Sister, as eager as the rest.
“You see?” Dar Oakley cried to them between bites. “You see?” Of course they pretended not to hear or notice him, but Dar Oakley didn’t care; he’d known since the first of the two-legs had raised their spears to him that he had discovered a thing that would change their lives, and for the better, and here was that better life.
Light rain fell over the field. Rooks discovered the bounty, following the Crows; a couple of Ravens from the upland forest too, who claimed one carcass for their own and were not disputed. The cherished dead of the settlers had all been carried away into the shelters, the dead of the attackers left in their different attitudes—except when (Dar Oakley was there to witness it) a number of the settlers went among them searching until they found the two big naked ones who had been first in the fight on the other side, and pulled off their heads. It took a while. They stuck the heads on long poles and with noise and gesturing carried them to the palisade around their dwellings, where they propped them up, long hair stiff with blood, jaws dropped and eyeballs gone.
Summer grass, then the drifts of leaves and snow, spring floods over the fields, covered the bodies and wore them away till only Jackdaws went on picking at the bones; but those two heads long remained aloft, familiar, bare, staring toward where they had come from.
CHAPTER TWO
The Crows have no dead.
It’s not that they live forever, never die, though Ymr has at various times believed that of them. Nor is it that they care nothing for those who die, and don’t mourn: they do. Mothers who have lost nestlings, mates who have lost their fellows—they can be driven to distraction by it. They hate death; a dead Crow discovered can occasion hours of loud keening by a big congregation, and the place is avoided for long after. Leave even a scrap of black plastic in a field and Crows will come and cry out on it in alarm and horror, keeping a distance, until they dare come see it’s nothing.