No, they know death, they mourn: but the dead aren’t alive to them; the dead are nowhere—in a nameless hollow in a heart, in memory or in story maybe, but no presences they can speak to, to comfort or be comforted by. No dead to love or fear. At least so it was then, and mostly still is.
For such beings it was hard to understand what People did. It appeared to them that People loved death: they cherished dead People bodies, and strove to make more of them, to handle or to harm.
“Do you not honor your dead?” the Singer once asked Dar Oakley, but not as though he didn’t already know the answer well enough. “Those who went before you, to whom you owe everything, life, knowledge, speech, everything?”
“I don’t know anything about them,” Dar Oakley answered. “They’re dead.”
“From whom then did you learn to fly, what foods to eat, what dangers to avoid?”
“From myself,” Dar Oakley said. “My mother, too. Her Servitor. Others.”
“And who taught them?”
Dar Oakley didn’t respond.
“There is a bond, a binding,” the Singer said, closing his eyes, “between the dead and those yet unborn, which the living must keep.” He reached out as though to take the hands of others, those on this side, those on that, himself between. And Dar Oakley felt beside him his own mother and his father, whose anxious heads he could remember looking down at him when he lay hidden on the forest floor; and behind them the mothers and fathers who had taught them, and behind them, others, forever. All dead but the living.
When had Crows begun? Not with himself, for he had parents; but so had they, and their parents too had parents, and there could have been no beginning, because each Crow had been hatched from an egg laid by another, and there could be no first of either.
“Crow is unborn,” the Singer said. “Crow never dies.”
“Crows die,” Dar Oakley said. “We do.”
“Crows die,” the Singer said. “Crow never dies. When Crow dies, Death will die too.”
Dar Oakley and the Singer sat on the high ledge above the grassland, from where Dar Oakley had by that time witnessed several battles. The Singer could not climb so far; a strong one had carried him up on his back, and would return when the sun was low to carry him down again. Below and far, the People (as Dar Oakley had by then learned to call them) herded their animals over that ground to graze. Dar Oakley could see a whitened People rib cage, like the claws of a great beast reaching out from under the earth.
“When you win a battle,” he said, “and kill those others, why do you all go around the field, and cut and stab and abuse them?”
“To take revenge on them for the hurts and humiliations their kind visited on our ancestors.”
“And the ones whose heads you keep?” Dar Oakley asked. “The same?”
“No,” said the Singer. “They were great fighters. We honor them in that way, and in our possession they grant us some of their strength.”
“They’re dead,” Dar Oakley said. “Dead as dead.”
“You’ve learned to speak our words, Crow,” the Singer said, smiling. “But you remain outside them still.”
How it was that Dar Oakley learned to speak to one of the People in this way, to argue with him and listen, is part of the story of how he came into Ymr; and it begins with the time Dar Oakley saw a Fox.
It was once again summer, toward evening. He was on far watch for his family, and at the glimpse of russet he was about to call a warning, but even as he bent forward with open bill, something made him pause.
A Fox? He had glimpsed its red head and black nose, certain of that, there around those Hawthorns he had seen it—but how would a Fox get high up in a bush? He’d never seen one climb and didn’t know if they could.
There it was again, that warning russet, there and gone again. Not coming closer, certainly. Dar Oakley moved to a better perch to see, and then to another. Where was it, that Fox? He gave a warning call, unable not to, but almost too small to be heard. And as though summoned, the Fox stood up, not far off, and looked his way. Stood up, like the two-legs. It was a two-legs, with a head like a Fox’s, a Fox’s ears and snout, but its own eyes, green below its empty Fox eyes. It was a two-legs with the head or pelt of a Fox put on top of its own head, with the Fox’s back fur and brush dangling down behind. In its hand the two-legs held a hunting stick, with a fang-sharp point.
For a long moment the two-legs studied Dar Oakley, and in that green-eyed gaze Dar Oakley felt a feeling new to him. Except by other Crows, or by a scanning Hawk or hunting Weasel for reasons of their own, Dar Oakley had never been looked at steadily for his own sake. He was caused to feel conscious of his own self there on this branch at this moment, as though he were both the looker and the seen. It was uncomfortable, like an itch beneath his head feathers.
The two-legs raised its stick and pointed, in that way they had: like a bird raising hackles, a Grouse inflating its breast, or a Boar pawing earth. It said, I am here and I defy you. It seemed Dar Oakley was to respond in some way—fly away, come closer, call friends. The two-legs dagged the air, eyes not leaving him. Annoyed and goaded, he broke off a dead twig from the branch where he sat, and getting it firmly in his mouth and pointed right, he becked, aiming his own stick at the two-legs, and then again. There, take that.
The being—it was a small one, perhaps young—did something remarkable then. It opened wide its mouth and called. It made a sound that resembled a Crow’s call, though not so closely that any Crow would mistake it. Ka-ka-ka-ka, it said in a rapid trill. Dar Oakley could see its blunt white teeth. It raised its own stick again, and it was clear now what was wanted—Dar Oakley pointed back with his. Again the two-legs made that Crow-like call, but smaller, and after trying the same trick again it went away, losing interest maybe. Dar Oakley let it go, and shook the stick from his mouth; but then before the two-legs was gone from sight, he flew to a higher perch to watch.
Was it hunting? It seemed to move in no definite way, ambling here and there, suddenly ducking down as though to stalk prey, or maybe sensing something that followed it, though Dar Oakley up above could see there was nothing near. He counseled himself to forget about it, go eat, see where his family had got to (he could hear Younger Sister far away call, and no one answer). He kept watch on the being, unseen by it. But dark was coming. The two-legs seemed to feel that too; Dar Oakley watched its restless head turn this way and that (the sightless Fox head turning too) and its feet carry it first one way and then another, stop and pause. In this fashion the two of them went a long way into the forest, the birds and small animals falling silent as the two-legs went among them, kicking at the entangling growth, and no wonder, but Dar Oakley was puzzled how a being could hunt if every being knew of its coming.
Not hunting. What was this game? The being went faster, turned more often, making a wide circle within the forest, why?
Then Dar Oakley understood—though what caused the understanding he couldn’t have said.
The little two-legs was lost.
It sat down then with a sudden bump, as though just then knowing it was so: lost.
How curious. It wasn’t at all far from where its family or kind had settled; there was enough day left even to walk there, yet the two-legs didn’t know the way to go.
Dar was made to think of that time when he first got out of the nest and tumbled to the ground, a place he’d never been before (he’d been no places before), and how Father and the Servitor had yelled at him to get up and fly, and his mother from a branch above had called to him to stay still and not move, her eye looking everywhere at once. And like the two-legs he’d sat, and not moved.