Strange how the knowledge of a name gives possession of a thing. When he learned spear and carriage and pot and cow from her, those things separated from the mass of things seen and became at once themselves and his. Other things took longer to grasp. He saw that she could call a call in the middle of a crowd of her kind and only one of them would turn to answer her. How? She had, she told Dar Oakley, called that one’s name.
“What name?” Dar Oakley asked.
“His own name,” she said. “The name that is his only.”
They were on the high rocks from where Dar Oakley had watched his first battle. They were rarely apart now, unless he was with Crows of his acquaintance who were fussed by her nearness, her fang-stick, and her cries; or if she was in her house as she called it with her kin, who did not like a Crow to be too close or too constant. “Death-bird,” she’d said, and then she fell on the ground headlong, eyes closed and motionless (death) then up and leaping with arms flapping (bird ) and pointed to Dar Oakley. It was his name, or the name of his kind.
Death. Bird. He thought of those naked fighters, summoning Dar Oakley’s flock to the field down there. Death-birds.
“But everything has two names,” she said. “The kind of thing it is, and its own name.” She pointed up toward the heights that rose behind them. “What do you call that? What is the name of it?”
“Mountain.”
“But its own name,” she said. “What is its own name?”
“Why would a mountain have a name? It can’t answer when you call it.”
She fell back laughing, her white stomach shaking; the little twist of skin in its middle. “You don’t know anything, Bird,” she said.
She had not one but many names all her own, some of them given to her and some that she had chosen herself; some meaningless to her except as calls; some the same as her mother’s or her father’s but with her own difference.
Her mother and her father had had their own names too, she told Dar Oakley, though they were both dead. The whole crowd of her kind—the People, as she named them—took care of her, though the one she loved best was the one Dar Oakley called the Singer, whom she too called the Singer, with a word in her own tongue that meant the same thing, but not quite.
“His father was a Beaver,” she said. “His mother was a wave on the water, and her mother was a stick of wood.”
She lay down flat on her back and looked up at the sky and the fast, low clouds. “You ought to have a name,” she said.
It was strange to hear that, like flying out of fog into clear air, or maybe the opposite. “How do you get a name?”
She thought about that, batting a bug from her face. It seemed odd to Dar Oakley that her own thick hair, and the bands of hair over each eye, were nearly the color of the Fox pelt she wore everywhere. One of her names for herself was With the Fox Cap. “You think of what you’ve done, and where you’ve been,” she said. “A thing you did that no one else did. You take a name from what you are.”
Dar Oakley pondered this, as well as he could.
“I saw you in the Oak tree deep in the forest. Your name can be In the Oak Tree in the Forest.”
“There are a lot of Oaks,” Dar Oakley said. “And a lot of Crows in them.”
“Then which one is yours?”
Dar Oakley thought of the Oak tree from whose high dead branch he had first imagined a land of no Crows. It wasn’t deep in the forest but at the edge of the open grassland, the lea.
“All right,” said With the Fox Cap. “You will be Of the Oak by the Lea.”
“Still,” he said.
“And a secret name too.” She sat up suddenly, as though she had heard a call, or sensed a threat, though there was neither, and she looked straight ahead at nothing, and made a sound. He looked at her, wondering. She made the sound again. It was short and harsh and he could make it too.
“Dar,” he said.
“Dar of the Oak by the Lea.”
He tasted that. It named him alone among all the things and beings of the world. Surely no Crow but he had ever had it, but then there was no other Crow anywhere who had any name all his own.
Summer turned to autumn; she followed him everywhere, running fast as a hare on those long legs, leaping rocks and streams, calling to him when he vanished in the distance—how short their sight was! He followed her, too, to places she regarded as distinct and important, though he could rarely see a difference between them and the surroundings; some she wouldn’t go into, he couldn’t grasp the reason why—the name of the reason had no cognate in his own tongue, for there was nothing in his world that needed such a name. She’d speak it whenever she hesitated to enter a certain dim grove, but the name didn’t say she was afraid; she said it when she knelt by a cold spring no different to him than other springs, dipped her hands into it and let the water pour out of the cup of them before she drank, but she wasn’t just refreshed or satisfied. He never knew when she’d use the word, or whether when she did she’d then stay away or rush toward whatever it was.
What they both agreed on: there was no reason to go into the dark reaches of the forest that clad the high mountain on one side of her demesne and his, and stretched forever beyond the river plain the other way. She’d been lost there, and not even deeply in, when Dar Oakley found her; she told him that when she was back again among the People, they’d warned her—she could be led astray, and be taken in so far she’d never return.
Led astray? Taken in, by whom or what?
She gave names, but not of things in his memory of her words; and when he asked what things the names named, she seemed not to know or not want to say. How, he wondered, could you know the names of things, and not know the things?
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said. “It’s just not worth it. It’s unpleasant. You can’t fly—you can’t run. It’s not profitable.” He could see farther than she could, but she could see things that he could not.
Autumn, and the great roost rebuilt itself. Fox Cap sat and watched them gather in the old place—Dar Oakley could see her far off across the river, wrapped in a pelt but (as he had directed her) hiding away the Fox cap, so as not to alarm his friends and relatives. They questioned him anyway—like most beings they dislike a bigger one sitting still and staring at them—and even if now and then she left a hare’s carcass or scraps from a roasting for them, they’d still give her one eye. What was that one doing there, they wanted to know, and why didn’t she go away? Dar Oakley shook off their questions: It wasn’t his business, he told them; she hadn’t harmed one of them, had she?
It was in those gatherings at evening that Dar Oakley tried to explain to the Crows about names, and how it could be that they could each have one of their own that was no one else’s. Few understood what he was on about, and the rest argufied and scoffed. One or two defied the rest and queried him about it, glancing around themselves, as though waiting to be mocked.