“Before we entered, Grubarr stopped us, touching our arms. He looked back and forth between us and said, ‘Words I give you, they cannot stem the pain. This I know. But I will tell you one thing, and that’s all. When I was nearly your age, Soffjian, my mother, she died. Droos. One day, strong, healthy, young; the next, stricken, ill for many moons. And then gone. The priests, they examined, they inspected, but they didn’t know. There was no knowing to be known.
“The Earth Priest went on, ‘I won’t lie. This wrenched my heart. I had no brother, no sister, and my father, he was—well, this isn’t about my father. No. It’s enough to tell you, I suffered. Truly. Deeply. Alone. I wanted to die. And this idea, this dying notion, it didn’t frighten, it didn’t pain. It was almost a comfort. I played with the idea, carried it with me, every day. Until one day, I lost it. I didn’t lose the grief, but I lost the dying wish. I don’t know who found it. Perhaps you.’ He looked closely at us, measuring, and then said, ‘Perhaps not. But if you did find it, it’s a thing that prefers to be lost. You’ll live. You’ll endure. And one day, you’ll recover. I did. All do in time. You will as well. No one told me this when my mother died. But had they, I wouldn’t have believed them. It’s no different with you, I’m thinking. But one day, many years from now, I’m also thinking you’ll give this same speech to another, and it will be their turn to be disbelieving.’
“I didn’t know whether to cry or scream or hit him or fall into his arms. So I did nothing. Soff opened her mouth as if she was about to say something, but it got lost before it came out. He said one other thing, telling us that if we ever wanted to talk he would listen, and then he dropped his hands. He reached into a wooden bucket and pulled out three damp strips of cloth. He handed each of us one and then wrapped the last around his head a few times, covering his mouth and nose.”
“For the smell?” Vendurro asked. And then added, “Sorry, Cap.”
“Yes. The strips were saturated in fresh horse piss. There are numerous ways a man can stink, but never so powerfully as when he has decided to die. Even after a few days they begin to rot inside, to liquefy, and the stink is like the worst sulfur and swamp gas, enough to make the strongest stomach turn and the strongest man gag. Horse piss is a preferable alternative.
“We tied the strips around our mouths and noses, Grubarr pulled the flap aside, and in we went. Our father was laying on a table near the middle of the room. His chest was bare but otherwise he was dressed as he had been the morning he was stabbed. His skin had changed color and was now an odd greenish-blue tint. His body bloated, but not uniformly, some parts more swollen than others. There was some fluid collecting beneath his nose and at the corner of his mouth. And even with the cloth around my face I felt my gorge rise.”
He looked closely at me and said, “Perhaps it was a blessing you never knew your father, and your mother gave you away for a bag of coins. You never had to see them dead.”
It wasn’t said with cruelty, but stung just the same. I wondered if my mother was still alive.
Braylar said, “Soff and I stood next to each other, staring. Neither of us cried. Not just then. I had cried myself into a stupor just after his murder, and I wasn’t quite ready to begin again. I simply stood there, feeling empty, small, lost, exhausted. And as Grubarr had said, unbelieving. Despite the evidence in front of me, I refused to believe this was happening. Soff reached over, took my hand in her own.” He stopped and added, “I see your skepticism. Do recall, this was before broken vows, yes? At one point, there was some rough tenderness betwixt us.”
Neither of us responded and he went on. “There were no windows in the room—no one else in the village wanted to smell death and Grubarr didn’t want perversely fascinated children disturbing his work—but there was a hole in the roof, like a smoke hole, although there would be no large fires in this room. It was overcast that day, ready to rain, and the deadroom was very dark, lit only by a few candles in the far corners and what weak light came through the hole above. Flowers and herbs hung upside down from the support beams, drying, so many that it seemed there was an inverted field suspended above us. There were many, many shelves, all of them lined with bowls and vials, lidded jars and small boxes, all manner of things. I’d become familiar with some of them over the winter. Crushed flowers, tooth and nail from a hundred different animals, a multitude of dyes, mushrooms, small pelts, oils, dried milk, chalk, charcoal, and on and on and on.”
“What plaguing for?” Vendurro asked.
“Grubarr had told us once that there were those in our tribe who didn’t understand the old ways, the elaborate treatments of the dead, or the living for that matter. Some argued, although never loudly, and certainly never in the presence of their priests, that the dead should be burned, their ashes scattered, or simply buried, and be done with it.”
“Aye,” Vendurro said. “That’s how my people went about it.”
Braylar nodded. “I remember Grubarr had been smiling as he told us that, his heavy hands busy grinding holly with a stone pestle. And saying, ‘Old men keep old ways. Were I a youth, I might argue for change. But I’m old, and I do only what I can do. Someday you and your ways will grow old too, and you’ll cling to them, moss to a stone.’
“I tried to imagine another day, any day other than the one I was in, but it was no good. The stench was too strong and my imagination too weak. Grubarr stepped past us and approached my father. He rolled up his sleeves—his forearms were thick and the gray hair that covered them thick as well, almost fur really. Any other day this struck me as funny and put me at ease in this place, but it didn’t that day.
“He took a damp cloth out of a wooden bowl and began cleaning the dried blood off our father’s belly. There was a lot of it, belly and blood. Soff and I released hands and stepped forward as well. As we got close my breath stopped in my chest. Having prepared four bodies for burial over the winter, we knew what to expect—the stiff, unyielding muscles, the cold skin, the blood that had congealed—but those experiences did nothing to prepare us for this.”
Maybe Braylar was right about my parents. Some things were better left unseen and unknown.
“I stopped at my father’s feet, afraid to move closer. His boots and the front of his pants were still covered with the reddish mud, the mud that clung to him when he fell forward. It was difficult to tell where mud ended and blood began.
“Soff was braver than I was, but only a little. She stopped at his waist, opposite Grubarr. The cloth on her face was rising and falling quickly. Grubarr continued working as if neither of us were there, wiping, wringing, wiping, wringing. Soff, said, very quietly, ‘He… are we going to bury him?’
“Grubarr didn’t look up, continued cleaning. ‘A simple grave, yes.’
“Soff reached out to touch our father but pulled her hand away. ‘And what will we bury with him? We will bury something, won’t we?’
“‘Yes,’” Grubarr said, wringing out the cloth. “‘All of us go with something, smallest to largest, youngest to oldest. Your mother, she’ll decide. She will include honeycomb, yes?’ He smiled at Soff but she didn’t return it. ‘If you have other suggestions, she’ll want to be aware of them, I think.’
“Soff nodded but said nothing else. A short time after, she asked, so quietly I could barely hear her, ‘What will we do… what will we do once you’ve cleaned him?’
“‘Hmmm. Nothing. Something. I’m unsure. The wound, it will be filled with paste, dill and ash, but I will do this. I’ll do most of what needs done. If there’s something I need from across the room, you’ll fetch this something, and if I need mixing, you’ll do this mixing. But little more. It’s enough that you are here. And here you be. So.’”
His ability to recall conversations so many years gone by was just short of wondrous. Was his memory simply that astute? Had the gravity of the occasion imprinted the words in him somewhere? Was he simply filling in missing pieces? Had Bloodsounder somehow brought his own memories into sharper relief?
>
I asked none of these though as he went on. “Grubarr finished wiping my father’s belly and dropped the cloth in the bowl of bloody water. I looked at the wound then and I couldn’t take my eyes off it. So small, so narrow, only two inches long. It was hard to believe this was enough to kill a man. And yet it had. So quickly. So very quickly.
“I remember thinking it was amazing that my father’s fat belly hadn’t stalled the blade, hadn’t saved him, and then I felt ashamed, bitterly ashamed. It seemed even in death I couldn’t respect him. And that was when I began to cry again. Feeling it come, I tried so hard to stop. I wanted so badly to be strong, to at least appear strong. But I could feel it slipping, all my strength washed away with the blood. I stared at the bottom of my father’s old boots, at the dried mud, tried to focus on that, to block the rest out, to think only of the mud, and how it was so close to raining, it might start any moment, and as soon as it did, there would be more mud, new mud, everywhere, the rain would turn the whole village, the whole world to mud. But it was no good. The tears fell, my nose began to run. I stepped back, began to shake. I bit my tongue and clenched my fists, my nails digging into my palms. But having found my tears again I couldn’t get rid of them.”
He recited this distantly, not quite like when he was narrating stolen memories of dead men, but not far off, either. If this was a confessional of sorts, it was devoid of passion or pain, as if it had happened to someone else.
“Soff saw me,” Braylar said, “and she started toward me, and then I began to sob. I fell forward on my knees, just as my father had a few days before, and I wished there was mud, mud I could swallow, drown myself in, but there was only dirt, and I grabbed handfuls of it, smashed it into my hair, my face, my eyes. Soff tried to pull my hands away, to hold me. And I could take no more of it. I climbed to my feet and burst out of the room, and the next, and the next, out of the longhouse. I ran into the woods, away from the village, ran until my lungs felt like they might split open in my chest, and then I continued to run, hoping they would, hoping they would rip and tear, and I would be the next one Grubarr would have to work on. But they didn’t, they only gave out. I fell over, and still my body wanted to cry, but there was no breath for it, so I lay there, wracked with silent sobs, wanting to die, feeling like I was, pounding the dirt because I couldn’t scream.
“It was only then that I realized where I’d run to. The grove of dying birch near our village. I had not gone nearly as far as I’d guessed. Having gotten some of my breath back, I stood there in the rain, suddenly angry. No, furious. At my father for getting killed, at the gods for allowing it, at my ancestors for creating him and me. I screamed at all of it, as new tears watered my face, and then I screamed at the futility of screaming at all.”
It was difficult to imagine the captain so overcome, but even more difficult imaging having to endure all this.
“I ran over to the closest standing birch, and kicked that, pushed it. The rotting tree groaned but didn’t fall. And so I retreated, ran at it again, hit it with my shoulder, with my head, and fell off it, bounced truly. Fell into the wet grass and looked up at it. But it was moving just then, albeit very slowly. It creaked, and groaned, and made all of the noise it could with its treeish voice, and then, with one last, wet crack, it fell. The rotten tree fell away from me, colliding with another as it went and taking that down too.
“My shoulder ached, snot bubbled out of my nose as my head pounded like a great drum, and I felt all the world like a gaping, pulsating tear, exposing all the tissues beneath, tissues that would die if they were open too long. I couldn’t have put it into those words then, but I was a wound that knew it must be cauterized, burnt until the blood stops flowing and the tissues blacken and close in on themselves. I didn’t have the words, but I knew—sensed perhaps—that that was what I must do.
“And so I got to my feet, ran to the next standing tree. I found a log alongside it, one of sturdier stuff than dead birch. I lifted the small log and clubbed the dying birch in front of me. I hit it, bits of peely white bark flying, again and again, until my hands blistered and split open and blood ran sticky across my palms, and then this tree fell as well. And it went on like this. I pushed and struck and screamed and cried, killing these dying trees, one after the other, killing them and cursing everything I could think to curse, over and over, clearing the already sparse glade like a maddened druid. And this went on, for how long I don’t know. But it continued until I could continue no more, until the wound was seared shut and a dozen more trees littered the ground around me.”
Braylar stopped for a moment, looking back and forth between us as if he had nearly forgotten there was an audience at all. Then he said, “Rather than help prepare my father for his funeral, I fled to the forest to knock down trees and rip my hands bloody.”
Vendurro clearly wasn’t accustomed to being in a position to soothe his captain at all, but he tried just the same. “You weren’t but a boy, Cap. And it was wrong, you having to prepare your father like that. Sorry if you feel the opposite, but got to say, that’s rough, even for a no-exception making kind of people. You weren’t nothing but a boy.”
“True enough. I was but a boy. But I was also the only relative capable of avenging my father, and I was off to a miserable and shameful start. I vowed then that the moment of weakness in the deadroom would be my last. Vowed that I would punish the man who killed my father, who prevented me from having even the chance to grow to appreciate the man he was, instead of recoiling from the one I thought I knew. I made these vows and several more, not knowing that they were but the first I would likely break.” He blew on his hands, shook his head, and said, “Rest while you are able.” Then he disappeared behind some trees.
Vendurro looked at me and said, “Revealing a cowardly deed is about the bravest thing a man can do. Not saying it’s cowardly, what he done, running like that. Sure I would have done the same, or bawled like a babe before even getting to that deadhouse, had to be dragged there kicking and screaming. But in his eyes it is. And…well, plague me, but I never heard him go off like that in all my years. Can’t say it don’t make me a wee bit nervous.”
I couldn’t disagree.
Vendurro moved off to find his own spot to sleep in and I looked around at our company. With Syldoon on the ridge, out in the woods to spot any incoming patrols, and back with the wagon, it really did seem a meager force. I pulled my thin blanket around me, vowing not to think about the likelihood of us all dying in this forest, and tried to find any stretch of earth that wouldn’t prove miserable. Even after clearing out every pine cone, pebble, and stick I could find, my chosen patch of ground still seemed just as bumpy and intent on keeping sleep at bay.
I tossed and turned for some time, and each movement only served to make things worse. Still trying to get over my amazement that Braylar not only spoke at great length with little reticence at all, but chose to reveal something so intimate and painful, I wrapped my blanket on my shoulders and walked out of our small glade, careful not to kick any of the bodies on my way. They were easy enough to avoid, even in the dark, as the Syldoon were breathing deeply or rumbling away in a mixed cadence of snores.
I climbed over a log, ducked under a tree, and was looking to find a good place to relieve myself. It was the woods, after all, so there wasn’t a really bad place, but I’d been told to walk far enough way that I didn’t piss on anyone’s head, but not so far I got lost in the woods.
Satisfying those requirements, I was about to pull my trousers down when I felt, rather than saw, someone nearby. I froze, hoping it was another Syldoon, and not a Brunesman sneaking through the brush, or an animal, or better still that I was merely imagining things.
I looked around. With the horned moon high in the sky, it didn’t take long to see Skeelana’s silhouette. I took a few steps closer, approaching from the side, watching the details of her profile materialize in the dark—the large lips, the puckish nose, the hair seemingly trying to flee her head in as m
any directions as possible. I was about to say her name softly when I noticed her eyes were closed. She stayed like that, standing perfectly straight, eyelids shut but fluttering gently, for a long time. As she wasn’t a horse, the only other thing I could imagine was that she was one of those people afflicted with nightwalking. There was a man like that in my wing of the university. He could wake up almost anywhere at any time of night. The headmaster had warned us to leave him be, under threat of the cane, so we had. I’d never seen them wake him or try.
But that was a contained building and complex—this was the wild, with a camp full of enemies half a mile away. I was debating whether to try to rouse her, or to possibly try to direct her back to wherever Soffjian had bedded down, when Skeelana’s eyes suddenly sprang open.
She didn’t look disoriented, which was odd, and she turned to head back to our small camp and saw me standing there watching, she jumped back, hands coming up, either to defend herself or to work some awful Memoridon magic on me.
I said, “Skeelana, it’s me! It’s Arki!” in something between a hiss and a whisper—a hissper.
She lowered her hands, though slowly, as if she wasn’t sure whether to believe me, or was possibly still considering working some invisible spell. “Damn you! What are you doing out here?”
Skeelana sounded flustered, or embarrassed, or both.
“I’m sorry, I needed to, uh, empty… anyway, what are you doing out here?”
Skeelana crossed her arms in front of her chest, though whether to ward off the chill or because she was adopting that staunchly offended posture only women have mastered, I couldn’t say. “That’s actually no business of yours.”
Well, that answered the arms question. “I didn’t mean to startle you, or, uh… I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t startle me. You—” she snapped. But after a moment, forced herself to soften the edge, if only a little. “You did, actually. A little. I’m mostly mad at myself for not being more careful. You did nothing wrong. In fact, you’ve been nothing but kind, actually. Which I find a little unnerving, to be frank.” She looked around, hearing something small rustling in the brush nearby. “We really do need to stop meeting in the dark alone like this. It might set people to talking.”
Veil of the Deserters Page 29