Ka

by John Crowley

  First they’d felled tall trees—the knocking of their heavy tools on the trunks and the crashing down of the cut ones was alarming, at least for a time. One tree had an old Crow’s nest in it! What if it had been new? They cut off the big limbs and with their carts and Oxen they took them to this mound, where others with other tools were digging deep, making holes in the ground. There were many. When a hole was made, not rude but as tidy and purposeful as a nest, they laid boughs, all stripped of twigs and bark, to line it, just as a Crow would lay sticks inside a nest, with as many disputes and rethinkings too.

  “What they’re doing,” said Kits, “is making a new kind of dwelling. Just like their other ones. But with the top going down into the ground, instead of up from it.”

  That got a laugh.

  “Well?” said Kits, for that’s what it looked like. And she wasn’t wrong: the People looked up now and then to see and ponder the observing Crows far off, and then returned to their task.

  It was only certain People who dug and felled trees. Others observed and made comments. The Crows had come to notice this distinction: males mostly, sometimes bigger than others though not always, and their mates, who were more covered in—there was now a Crow word for this, because it was interesting and seemed important—in decoration, shiny, sun-catching, enviable things wound in their thick pelts or around their arms and fingers, and wrappings of bright colors, like Kingfishers. The males bore weapons different from others’ weapons, and when People rode in carts, it was they who rode while others walked.

  “Those are their Biggers,” Cuckoo’s Egg said. “I’d suppose.”

  No one disagreed. They could see, though, that those Biggers deferred to the one that Dar Oakley knew as With the Fox Cap but for whom the other Crows had no name. She bore no weapons; she was dressed simply, still neither as male nor female. She sat still. But she was the center of this, whatever it was.

  Up on the rock ledge where the Singer’s body had been laid—the Crows could easily see that far—the bier remained, and now there were other biers nearby it. The place was marked with tall poles to which wind-stirred things like broad wings had been attached. The rock wall behind, which Fox Cap had climbed to stir Dar Oakley to action, had been scored in whorls and patterns, and marks that the Crows could not see as faces. The steep ascent to this place from the flat land had been widened, and steps cut for feet.

  “Look there,” said Two Mates.

  A group toiled upward there, bringing amid them a thing that was growing familiar to Crows—a thing of sticks lashed together with hide ropes, on which lay a figure bound in wrappings, only the white face visible as yet, but soon to be all bared.

  “Ah yes,” said Kits.

  “Looks small,” said Cuckoo’s Egg.

  “Still,” said Two Mates.

  “Time to go to work,” said Kits—or something resembling that in the tongue of Ka, which had no words for time or work. Kits whetted her long bill three times, clack clack clack, and they dropped down to greet the People climbing up.

  Not all the People’s dead were brought there. Some were burned in great greasy fires whose smoke drove away every other living thing but People; some were put into boats with gifts or possessions around them, and the boat was sunk where the lake was deep. Some unfriended or inconsiderable People were just put in holes in the ground and covered up. But the warriors, the Biggers, their mates, their dead children: it was these ones that were given to Crows for the work they did. (That work with the dead, that practice, has a lovely and fearful name in our People language. It’s called excarnation.)

  Dar Oakley schooled the Crows in how to behave near People now. No more loitering at the midden, quarreling with Dogs. No more petty thievery. No more riding the Hogs’ backs and digging the fat blood-filled ticks from their thick skin—it was beneath their new dignity. It was all good advice, and some Crows heeded it some of the time. Also, he said, they should notice when one of the People was carried into his dwelling and didn’t come out again; or when one grew swollen as a gorged snake with young about to drop. Then gather nearby, on the roofs of their dwellings, and show yourselves ready. Some of the Crows commenced doing this, though not many Crows can tell one of the People from another, dying or gravid or not.

  “Fine,” said the Crow Kits to Dar Oakley, “but we aren’t Ravens; you know we can’t be as solemn as they can.”

  “The People think that Ravens are wiser than Crows,” Dar Oakley answered. “But it might be that they can’t tell us apart all the time.”

  “Ha! One or the other,” said Kits.

  This Kits, by the way, had got her name because of a story about a mother Fox she’d seen.

  That vixen had gone mad, she’d told the Crows. And was eating her kits.

  Eating them?

  Two, just born. She ate them both.

  No! Nothing left of them?

  Well, Kits had replied, not much. And she clacked her bill three times.

  That story always got a laugh.

  Kits was unmated, though surely old enough to be; she had a look about her different from Crows thereabouts, her head as black as her wings where their heads were duller, her plumage deepest blue-black, glossy and shot through with iridescence, violet and purple and even scarlet, that came and went. No one could tell Dar Oakley where in the demesne she’d been born or who her kin were—a vagrant, a newcomer, but that was long ago it seemed, during the time that had apparently passed while Dar Oakley was elsewhere. He found it hard not to stare at her, and he thought about her even when she wasn’t there, and said her name to himself: Kits. It was coming on spring.

  “When the planting is done,” Fox Cap said to him, “and the lambing and calving are over, then we’ll go. You’ll come too.”

  Dar Oakley never stopped marveling at the way she, and all her kind probably, could think forward into seasons not yet come, what might happen then and what they’d do. It was like the way they thought about seasons past, and regretted or rejoiced at what they’d done then.

  She stood, arms crossed, by the lakeshore. Mist rose from the still-icy surface, drawn away gently by dawn winds. The island in the center of the lake was leafless, pale and transparent, as though it could be reft away too by the moving air. There the Singer’s bones had been taken when even the Jackdaws were done with them; they’d been put under the ground in a great pot, and a number of tall stones were borne out over the water with great effort (one lost in the depths) and set up, as tall as stone People, around the place. Dar Oakley could not have seen those stones standing there before the Singer’s bones were placed in the center of them, and yet he knew he had.

  Fox Cap spoke of him often, and had decided that she must do what the Singer had asked: she and the People would return to the place from which they had first come, where their old dead lay; and they would bring those dead here. To the upside-down houses that the People here were making for them.

  So Kits was right: houses for People not to live in but to be dead in.

  “We’ll all go,” Fox Cap said. “Everyone here. All of you, too.”

  “It’s a busy time,” Dar Oakley said, looking away. “Young just born. All the care.”

  “Not for you, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea. You’re like me.”

  She meant unmated, single, free.

  “Well,” he said. “I don’t know.”

  Fox Cap turned to him, as though roused from her thoughts. “Don’t know what?”

  “Well, I don’t know, anymore,” he said, and flitted in embarrassment. “That’s all.”

  It had happened to countless Crows for countless generations, but of course for every Crow to whom it happens, it happens for the first time in the world. What Dar Oakley felt as the season turned was that his being had doubled in size, because his being included another’s. How could that be? How could it be that someone so swift, so smart, so big, could come to be part of himself? Wherever he happened to go as the days lengthened, like as not he’d find Kits already there, o
r arriving soon after, surprised too, but not as surprised as he was.

  “You,” she’d say. “I know you.”

  There was, he thought, some strand of something that connected them, something they couldn’t see or feel, some tightening web. Wonderful. Later on though he’d think, Well, she just kept her eye on me and knew where I might go, and went there too, which seemed just as wonderful, really, if you thought about it, which at the time he couldn’t have done. He’d just marvel, and beck suavely, and say his name, which he couldn’t help but think she knew well enough.

  She was rarely alone anyway, wherever she was. Males he’d never seen before would cluster around her, seemingly distilled out of the black earth or the rocks—rage that they dared approach her, that she should accept their presence! For the first time he understood that gloomy and suspicious Crow his father. Not that any of them mattered to her; she’d up and fly off in an unhurried way as though vanishing and leave them all behind, and Dar Oakley, too, to stare at one another. How could she go so slow so fast? If he got his courage up and beat after her, she’d stay always ahead of him; he’d lose sight of her and then in banking and turning this way and that he’d spot her far ahead, resting, not waiting for him especially; when he got close enough to plan to perch beside her, he couldn’t find where she’d been sitting. Gone again.

  When next she did that, winged away, he called after her, “Stop!” She didn’t. He fell onto a branch, defeated, and called again, but not a call, “Please stop.”

  And she stopped. She took a perch and stayed. He gathered strength and flew to where she was and took a perch not too near, as quietly as he could.

  “Why did you stop?” he asked her, and immediately wished he hadn’t, but she only turned her tender left eye on him (the right, he thought, had some cold cunning in it) and said, “Because you asked, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea.”

  He thought she could no more cease to behave as she did than he could cease to follow her—but he only thought this afterward, when he could mock himself for his despair at her willfulness. The way she’d fly off in silence if he said the wrong word. The way she’d dare him to please her: on the lake’s shore she’d say to him, “See if you can fly up and dive under this water.”

  “I can’t do that! I’m not a Duck.”

  “Oh, well then,” she’d say, and leave him there.

  Or she’d say, “The Eagle on the heights has hatched young. Go take the flesh she brings to them and bring some here to me.”

  This he actually (it was spring!) wondered if he might try to do. But before he could brace himself for it, she was laughing at him. Mad Crow! Did she even mean the things she said? Could she really not make up her mind about him or was it all just a tease, a game she’d played before? He didn’t any longer know how old he was himself, but he felt she was older than he, knew more about these things, had maybe even had a mate, maybe long ago; but when he questioned her, she only said, “Life’s long, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea.”

  At last on a day of warm, stifling wind and mist he was with her on the ground watching her eat—he seemed to have lost his own appetite just for the moment—and another male, big, loud, unkempt, landed between them and began to make gestures toward Kits. No! Dar Oakley went for him without a thought, and the bird laughed and dodged his attacks as though Dar weren’t worthy of a response, and turned toward Kits again—and Kits charged him too, fierce, furious, and ran off the astonished Crow, get away! Dar Oakley joined in, chasing him a long way and feeling himself grow larger as he flew. When the lout was well gone, they descended together, laughing, bill to bill, he delighting in her, she in him.

  After that it went on between them as it does and must but as it never had before, for Dar Oakley anyway, so that soon he was no longer single but doubled by the inclusion of Kits in him and he in her, all the time, everywhere; the process or dance of it took no thought at all. They didn’t agree to build a nest, but a nest was started—not in the crotch of the Oak at the edge of the old freehold, where he’d imagined that it would be laid when he was young and single; no, she chose a place more modest and concealed, as his own mother had. They knew how to build it, she maybe because she’d seen it or done it once or twice or many times; he’d never done it but he knew too, and the more they did it, the more they knew how to do it, and the more they knew how to do it, the more they knew what made them do it.

  “Don’t bring more of those, Dar Oak-by-the-Lea.”

  “No? I thought . . .”

  “Just look at it.”

  “Oh.”

  “This. This is good. Bring more of this.”

  “It’s all I found.”

  “Go find more.”

  “Kits!” he said. Without thinking he took her black bill in his to make her stop. All in a moment they were fighting, then not fighting.

  That was the what, and he knew it. It was sure to come, yet couldn’t have been imagined before it came. Huge as it was, it lasted only a moment, a moment’s contact and a spasm, but Dar Oakley was as stunned by it as if he really had dived under water, or been thrown right up into the sun. One bird. Right away they began again, but less certainly; abashed, maybe, by the power of it. He moved clumsily to cover her and this time she flew from him, or from it.

  Dar Oakley open-billed, wings spread low, ashamed and angry.

  Soon enough, though—on the nest’s edge, on the ground below it, then even in the air around about—they came to recognize its coming on, came to expect it, to earn it together, to gain it, or fail to. Succeeding often enough (as his mother’s Servitor once said) that they knew the forming chicks in all the green eggs she’d lay were his and hers alone. Whereupon it—the what—began to turn from sudden and hot to steady and warm, so that in the greening days Dar Oakley was able to ponder it, how he’d become double, and what he’d now have to do and bear. And he could bear it too. Like any Crow.

  Here we go again, his mother’d said. He laughed to think of that.

  “What?” Kits on her eggs inquired, bored and fretful, hardly visible above the nest’s edge.

  “Nothing,” Dar Oakley said. “Nothing at all.” He hadn’t visited the old freehold, hadn’t seen his mother in many seasons. Did she still live? It wasn’t a Crow thing to wonder about. She, like him and like Kits, had surely known that first time with Father, and perhaps could have told her son about it. Perhaps did tell him. He thought then of the time he had been with Fox Cap and the Singer on the high ledge and the Singer had talked of the bond between the living and the dead, the dead from whom the living learned to live, even as those dead had learned from others who lived and died before them. Crow never dies, he’d said.

  “What will become of them?” Dar Oakley asked of no one. “How will they do?”

  “What I wonder is,” Kits said, mocking just a little, “what their names will turn out to be.”

  It was high summer when at last the preparations had been made and the People went out from their settlement toward the place from which they had come, to take back their dead who remained there.

  The old and the very young were left behind to mind the herds, drive the flocks to the summer grasslands, keep the fires going, and gather from the fields. The others went out the gates of the palisade, carrying food to eat on the way, and pots to cook it in; they drove Sheep and Goats for food and milk, and also for gifts—one big male walking with a kid across his shoulders. The warriors went first, with their weapons and the strong pelts they wore studded with iron to stop a weapon, and caps the same. Carts carried the Biggers, one propping up a sword so large that no one could ever wield it in a fight—Kits said that it surely wasn’t intended to be put to use, so it was only to stand for the strength and force of the Lake People. So many things they did and made and carried only to stand for other things; the trouble they took about it.

  “We too,” Kits said. “To them we are what we stand for. We Crows.”

  “Death-birds,” Dar Oakley said.

  They went out with a huge noi
se from their drums and from their horns (the Crows’ vocabulary of People words grew every day) that were shaped like Snakes, the tail in the blower’s mouth, the Snake’s long body rising up, its mouth open wide from which the sounds came.

  “But Snakes make no sound,” Kits said.

  Some People blew into the hollowed horns of Rams.

  “At least Rams make noises,” Kits said.

  “Not like that,” Dar Oakley said. The Crows of this region had never known of Rams before People came, but now they did.

  In the trees around them, from which they observed the People passing, Kits’s fledglings perched, all strong, all flying now: the four that had hatched. They flitted, changed places, pecked at wood, waited to be told where next to go for food, called in the pleading tones of nestlings as often as they called like grown-ups. Their names were . . . Dar Oakley has forgotten their names.

  After the bellowers and hooters came Fox Cap, standing in a cart, shaken and distracted. Dar Oakley took a higher perch to see. A few young Crows without anything better to do were following the crowd at a distance.

  “Is that One?” Kits asked—using the word for a being whose sex isn’t known.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to follow One?” Kits said.

  “I can’t,” Dar Oakley said. “The young.”

  “They’re almost grown.”

  “Their eyes are still blue,” Dar Oakley said. “They don’t know when the Toads migrate; they can’t tell a Fox from an Otter.”

  “You want to go. Go.”

  “You come too.”

  “I can’t come. The young ones need me.”

  Dar Oakley flitted, uneaseful, pointing his bill earthwise, skywise. The People’s noise diminished.

  “If you don’t go,” Kits said, “we won’t know what happened, will we? And why, and what for, and all that.”