by John Crowley
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.
“You,” said Dar Oakley. “You could have a name.”
“I already have a name,” the one he spoke to said. “Crow.”
The rest laughed, but the Crow was in earnest. “No, but why do I need another?”
“Well,” Dar Oakley said. “Suppose you’d done a big, brave thing—”
That got a laugh too, but Dar Oakley cried out above the laughter. “It was you, wasn’t it you, who once pulled an Eagle’s tail, made her drop that Rabbit she had?”
“Fish, it was.”
“Ah, yes.”
“Big one.”
“Tearing it to bits by the river, and you just went right in there to annoy her, tug her tail, and kept at it till she turned on you, and left the fish. Which we all got.”
“I got least.”
“So now we tell the story,” Dar Oakley said. “But who’ll remember one day that it was you?”
“I will.”
“And when you’re gone?” The Crows grew quiet; that wasn’t a subject to be mentioned lightly. “How would it be if ever after we around here could name you as the one who long ago did that?”
The Crow stared up and down and around as though unable to gather this thought to himself. “So?” he said at last.
“So your name. It could be Pulled the Eagle’s Tail.”
“That’s a mouthful.”
“Well,” Dar Oakley said. “It’s a story.”
“Have you got one?”
“Mine is Of the Oak by the Lea.”
That was greeted with rapturous hilarity, but the Crow now named Pulled the Eagle’s Tail didn’t join in. He did dash and jab at one who teased him, and the rest cried out on him for it, Hey, hey, but it was sleep time now and the elders were shushing them.
The next day a Crow who’d been nearby on that evening came to Dar Oakley alone at the feeding-place, and said in the lowest of calls that she wanted a name too, if she could get a good one.
Her name, when it was found—and the other names that began then to adhere first to this Crow and then to that one—in time they came to be passed on to young, who in the names carried their mothers and fathers; and their young added others all their own. The names were carried away with those who departed the flock. Over the course of a hundred generations the names (like the names the People bore) were worn smooth the way river stones are worn rolling over one another, until the act or the place or the habit or the tale at the heart of a name could hardly any longer be discerned: but it was there, and still is.
Winter was hard that year. Snow fell early, and hardly ceased; it hid the carcasses of anima
ls dead of cold or predation so that the Crows couldn’t find them. In the winter roost the Crows at evening were quieter; no sense wasting energy socializing when a long night lay ahead, and no easy breakfast in the morning. Crows were spoken of who hadn’t returned to the roost at the blue hour: caught, lost, too weak to find food. In the deep woods a Deer family—mother, father, yearling—became trapped within a sort of palisade they’d unwittingly made: they’d tread down the snow in a wide circle, nosing for hidden vegetation, while around that beaten circle the falling snow piled higher, till it was too high to leap. Safe within from Wolves, they died of hunger.
Crows found them, watched till the warming sun softened them, saved their own lives.
Dar Oakley rarely saw Fox Cap. When he and others flew to the settlement to look for provender, they saw few People at all; in the snow People went in packs like Wolves to hunt, and kept all they caught. Best anyway to stay a safe distance from such big, hungry predators: word was that Crow feathers had been seen in the settlement, black on the snow. When Dar Oakley did glimpse Fox Cap, she was wrapped in furs, and the People made no friendly gesture toward him. Bound in snow like the Deer in their habitation. It was good to have wings.
When the roost broke up, the Vagrant left the flock, and Dar Oakley’s Younger Sister flew away with him, out of the flock’s and her family’s way and their disapproval of her choice, for the Vagrant had never ceased to be an outsider. “Very well,” Father said on learning of it from the Servitor, “but they’d better not come near our bounds ever again.” Dar Oakley was sorry about it, since in the throes of spring madness he’d hoped it would be him she chose; he was ready to leave with her forever, wherever, but no. His parents still had one of their young from the previous spring to help them—along with the Servitor, to whom Dar Oakley gave the name Mate of One Mated.
Where was Fox Cap? He went to the lake now charged with snowmelt, to the greening woods, and she was in neither place; she wasn’t at the grove she had a special name for, not at the Wellspring or the Tall Rock, which also had names that she’d told him but that he couldn’t remember unless he heard her say them. He felt old without her, without his father and mother, without a freehold of his own. Himself alone. “Make her your mate,” the Vagrant had said or sneered, on his way away with Younger Sister, who never once looked back.
There was no battle in that spring; the People brought no bounty to the Crows and their hatchlings, and some of Dar Oakley’s flock regarded him resentfully, that he had nothing more for them. On a sultry day, suddenly hot, he was returning to the old demesne over the long moor from the lake and the settlement with a crowd of young ones who still thought he might produce something good if they stuck with him. The air was thick and wearying. Far off, daywise, silent lightning gleamed through clouds gray and white as a Goshawk’s back.
Dar Oakley was thinking about the People, and why they did what they did, when the flight of Crows was struck by a sudden gust, first breath of a gale, and in a moment he was alone in a shifting world, pummeled as though by something alive. Unable to hold to a direction, he was tossed far and fast, the wind bowling him bill over tail; the dark clouds came on fast behind and above as though to catch and swallow him. He wanted the cover of dense Fir-woods to break the wind and hold off the rain, but already he had been blown far from such places that he knew of. The first hard drops struck his wings and head even as he saw a stand below that looked safe—the wind as though taking pity on him threw him that way. It was nearly dark as night now, and would be darker in there where those black trees were thrashing the rain. Almost he felt as Fox Cap did, that he was being warned away from the grove, even as the wind propelled him in.
Anyway safe. He held tight. Rain falling that heavily could have driven him down to earth if he’d been in the open, maybe drowned him in mud. He’d heard of that happening.
The wind diminished. He flitted and groaned and shook his wet head. When he stopped, he heard those sounds continue: flit, shake, groan. He wasn’t alone in that stand. The noise of rain rattling through the Fir-limbs made the sounds of a wet bird hard to locate, and Dar Oakley peered this way and that—even a Hawk would seek shelter from this storm—when a distinct croak came from right behind him.
A large and seemingly elderly Raven sat perched on a branch behind and just above his own.
The bird took no notice of Dar Oakley, only stared into the dripping branches and the white world of rain beyond. Still Dar Oakley took the precaution of taking two sidewise steps away. He would be careful not to speak if not spoken to, as was the Crow custom with Ravens. But with a further glance he realized he knew this bird: he had seen it elsewhere.
“Master Raven,” he said, not able to discern its sex. He becked as respectfully as he could in the wet. The bigger bird turned one eye on him, and then away again. “Master Raven,” Dar Oakley said again, too curious now to notice the snub, “I have seen you before. You and another. Master, you were there, weren’t you, when the People”—the strange People word used for themselves came unconsidered out of Dar Oakley’s mouth, and the Raven turned again to look at him: not as though to acknowledge a Crow, but as though surprised to hear that word from one—“when the People left those others dead, and we all ate, and yourselves too—”
“The battole,” said the Raven.
That was the first Dar Oakley heard that word for the thing, the thing he could think about but not name: a word in Raven speech for the unpronounceable word in the speech of ymr ymr that Fox Cap used. Now it was his.
“The battle,” he said. “Yes.” A streak of lightning. Thunder broke with a sudden, singular noise. Dar Oakley had heard of birds slain in the air by the mere force of a thunderclap, dropping dead from air to earth. “That was good eating,” he said, and eyed the Raven, but whether the Raven agreed, or cared what a Crow thought about that day, was hard to know. “And to see how those People went among the other People their fighters had killed, and hacked and cut and shouted at them. How they wrapped up their own dead and kept us from them.”
The Raven said nothing.
“Strange,” Dar Oakley opined.
“Is gnot,” the Raven said, in so low a mutter that Dar Oakley wasn’t sure he heard it. He waited; just when he believed there would be no more, the Raven spoke again.
“You have gnot lived among them as we have.”
“Oh. Ah,” Dar Oakley said, humbly he hoped.
“For uncounted seasons,” the Raven said in his hoarse Ravenish growl, “in forests far billwise from here, in lands where many of them live. Have seen battoles far greater than that one, as many People as are Crows in winter roost, all fighting and killing. And after, we were not prevented from going among them.”
“Crows, too?”
“I did not perceive that those People could tell difference, Crow or Hraven,” the Raven said, as though this had been the greater wonder.
Dar Oakley thought of it, of People in many places far away, Crows and Ravens alongside them after battles as he and his flock were alongside Fox Cap’s People. Eating the flesh of the carcasses that the People had made. Maybe it was common, but that didn’t make it less strange. It made it more strange.
“I wondered,” he said, “if they really knew that those dead were dead. The way they went on fighting with their dead bodies, or cherishing their own.”
“They gnow,” the Raven said. “I will tell you now, Crow, what we Hravens learned long ago, so that you may understand.”
Dar Oakley thought of saying some grateful word but couldn’t think of one, and said nothing.
“The People,” the Raven said, “believe that dead People are still alive. In their flesh and even in their dry bones.”
“They can’t,” Dar Oakley said. “They can’t believe that.”
“They do. They believe that dead can feel insults and honors. When everything they are is rotted past even Crows’ relishing, and sunken in earth. When living have made holes in earth and cached those bones in them a
nd covered them over again.”
“No.”
“They think those ones are among them still, as they were before. They visit them in places where they died, or they avoid those places, it might be for years, thinking that dead still remain there, angry or vengeful.”
Dar Oakley had hardly understood all this in the Raven’s high speech. “I thought you said, Master, that they put them under the ground and cover them up.”
“They do. Or they burn them to black nothing in fires. No matter. Wherever those dead are, they are Realm: realm of dead People—like realm of living ones. From that realm they issue to reach People who are living.”
“Realm?” It was a name or a word Dar Oakley didn’t know.
“Realm,” the Raven said. “Like realm of Hravens. I suppose even Crows may be realm.”
Dar Oakley didn’t know if the Crows were a realm. A place, was it, where they collected, like a roost? A realm. He swallowed the Ravenish word like a nutmeat, and it was his.
A realm of dead People. Strange birds, he thought, Ravens, to think up such a thing. “Well, I’d like to go there, wherever it is. And see.” He cocked his head, to show it was a joke.
The Raven lifted its broad wings. The rain had passed, and gusts of cold wind searched the evergreens. “If you eat dead Them for long enough, Crow,” the Raven said, “perhaps you will.”
Without farewell, the black bird pushed off and into flight.
When Fox Cap at last came and found Dar Oakley again, she had grown even more—so much more that he wondered for a moment if she was she. But no one else would wear the Fox cap but she, and no one else would speak to him, and listen to him speak.
He was overjoyed. He didn’t know why. They wandered together. She seemed to have gone farther away than the settlement on the lake, to somewhere where things were not the way they were here, as the Vagrant had once claimed to have done; and had seen things there she wouldn’t speak of, or for which she had no words. She was like the answer to a puzzle he hadn’t yet been set—though that wasn’t a thought that the Crow Dar Oakley was then could think.
