And so, one fine autumn day, Ferle went forth on her first errand as Necromancer Rahmik’s page. She had been entrusted with delivering invitations to certain worthies of the town of Lynka. The cards were written in the necromancer’s most flourishing script, above his discreetly printed name.
To my esteemed Monsieur[1] _________
This evening at sundown,
the suicide Gaitho Marlem
will be available to answer inquiries
NECROMANCER RAHMIK, MAGISTER
Treasures Found, Betrayals Revealed, and
Future Predicted with Astonishing Accuracy
Ferle trotted along the cobbled streets and muddy lanes of Lynka in a powdered wig, white stockings, and jacket and breeches of velvet (in an unfortunate shade of puce somewhat the color of raw liver). She took care not to dawdle as the former page was wont to do. The page’s duties were ever so much more pleasant and interesting than those of an under-housemaid, which that morning had included preparing Goodma Gaitho Marlem for her reanimation.
Goodma Gaitho was the first suicide by drowning that Ferle had ever seen, and she had found the goodma’s corpse distasteful to look upon and smell. The suicide had been three days in the miller’s pond after wading in with her apron tied around some fist-sized stones. Her choice of the miller’s pond indicated she held a grudge; after all, she could have jumped into the surf around the Barber’s Razor and been reliably carried out to sea by the undertow and never seen again.
Ferle and the housemaid had bathed the suicide and pulled on a long white muslin gown to cover her swollen body; they had combed her hair and tucked it under a lace wimple. Lastly they had covered her with a linen sheet up to her chin. The sheet, bleached as it was to a blinding white, didn’t hide the smell, or the seeping, or her face, which was puffy and battered and had turned various hues of yellow, purple, and green, none of them flattering.
Necromancer Rahmik had come in to take a look at the suicide. He crimped his thin lips together and his nostrils flared. He unpinched his lips to say, “It will have to do,” and left them to the tidying up.
Goodma Gaitho would indeed have to do, for the necromancer didn’t have his pick of corpses. He stayed on the fair side of laws both municipal and ecclesiastical, and he took only the dead whom the priest (who kept a strict account of those eligible for heaven) refused to bury in the churchyard. Heathens, suicides, hanged men, unbaptized infants, and women who died of botched abortions were no longer of the priest’s flock, and the necromancer was welcome to them. Dead infants were of no use to the necromancer, and as for other sorts of corpses, he was lucky if there were one or two a month. The fact that his fortune sprang from the misfortunes of others was not held against him in Abigomas. In those days the gentry were not above making an honest living.
The approach of evening found Ferle uncommonly excited. It was her first opportunity to observe a reanimation. The page-who-ran-away had thought too highly of himself to speak to Ferle, but he had confided to the footman, who told the cook, who told the housemaid, who told Ferle, that he (the necromancer) reanimated corpses by irritating certain animalcules that inhabited them: animalcules too small to see, but capable of vigorous movements that allowed the dead to speak.
Although Ferle was curious about the method of reanimation, what she really wanted to know was what the dead would have to say. The necromancer’s house was full of shades, but they never spoke, not to her or anyone else—save for the shade of Grandma Lialel, Ferle’s paternal grandmother, who was always filling Ferle’s ears with good advice, which she was no more likely to heed than the advice of the living. This grandmother had died when Ferle was four, and had been her companion ever since. Without her Ferle would surely have been as homesick as the page-who-ran-away, homesick for a home that had vanished long before she was indentured.
Ferle was always polite to the silent shades who lingered about the house of Necromancer Rahmik. It seemed to be polite to ignore them. No one else in the household ever acknowledged their presence or talked to them or about them. Ferle had even seen people walk right through them, but she couldn’t bring herself to take politeness quite so far. She scrubbed around their feet when they refused to move, and when she passed one, she gave a little nod, she couldn’t help it. But the shades were preoccupied, like most grownups, and seemed to take no notice that she noticed them.
Shades didn’t frighten Ferle, not like corpses. Shades showed no shocking signs of how they had died, bloated tongues bulging from the mouths of hanged men, that sort of thing. They looked more or less substantial. Indeed, many appeared far younger and healthier than their corpses. Grandma Lialel, for instance, had died at forty-two, but her shade looked shy of twenty.
Tonight the necromancer was going to make the shade of Gaitho Marlem speak. That morning the suicide’s shade had said nothing, just sat on a cane chair in the corner of the room while they washed her corpse—sat with stones in her lap, sea-smoothed stones of the sort that covered the only proper beach along the steep rocky shores of Abigomas.
The shade would not have been out of place in a gathering of gossips. She had a convincing solidity, and was dressed like any goodma in an embroidered linen blouse, blue kirtle, and apron fringed with strings.[2] Burghers’ wives might imitate foreigners, but the goodmas of Abigomas were, in those days, content to dress as they always had.
The corpse’s face was disfigured, but the shade’s was not. Ferle could see the goodma had been a person with a pleasant face, a face thoroughly used over a certain number of years. There were furrows in her forehead from raising her eyebrows, and crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes from squinting, and grooves from her nose to the corners of her mouth from smiling or frowning. But that morning her face had been idle, and sagged as if the strings that tugged her expressions into place were all undone. Yet her hands had been busy, shuffling and turning the stones in her lap, and the purposeless and constant clicking of the stones had worked upon Ferle like an itch she couldn’t scratch.
At the appointed time guests began to arrive, and Page Ferle ushered them into the waiting room, which for some reason was called the drawing room. The furnishings were in the antique provincial mode of Abigomas, being weighty, dark, deeply carved, and upholstered in horsehair and brocades a century old. The visitors, in their white wigs and modish embroidered waistcoats, perched on the dark divans like bright songbirds in a somber oak wood. (Though it must be said that the songbird metaphor fails utterly when it comes to the visitors’ faces, which were also in the antique provincial mode, being weighty, dark, deeply carved, and upholstered with coarse whiskers.)
Necromancer Rahmik entered in a long puce robe nicely trimmed in gray fox. He greeted his guests without a great deal of ado, and Ferle found his brusqueness quite shocking. But his patrons were not offended. They all knew a reanimation could not be sustained long. Each guest would have a chance to question the suicide, in an order of precedence understood by all and never spoken of; therefore the mayor rose first, worthiest among worthies, though not the wealthiest.
The necromancer himself had instructed Ferle as to her duties that evening, and she was determined not to let her wits wander. She stepped smartly down the long corridor to the office where the suicide Goodma Gaitho lay swathed on the marble slab, and she held her candlestick high to light the way for the necromancer and mayor. The shade of Ferle’s grandma Lialel waited outside the office door and hissed at the girl as she went by, saying, “Keep your mouth buttoned, Ferle, and your eyes peeled.” (Grandma would never extravagantly coin a new phrase when an old one would do well enough.)
Necromancer Rahmik had no machinery hidden in his chamber, no chicanery of that sort, merely a tall glass-fronted cabinet full of jars that Ferle had frequently dusted. He didn’t require darkness to conceal his doings. On the contrary, ample light made his reanimations more impressive. So Ferle went, a
s instructed, to light the tall tapers in the candelabra at the rear of his office. She passed the shade of Goodma Gaitho, who was still sitting in the chair in the corner and stirring stones in her lap. The goodma looked up, and Ferle made a small curtsey. But the shade’s gaze fastened on the necromancer, as he fastidiously folded back an embroidered scarf to reveal the face of the corpse.
The mayor made an unpleasant sound, and Ferle set her candlestick on the sideboard and hurried to his side with a silver basin in case he was going to be sick. But the mayor swallowed and dropped himself, rather heavily, on the sturdy chair provided.
The necromancer held a mirror over the corpse’s mouth to prove the body entirely dead—though in this case that was hardly necessary. After tying a kerchief over his nose and mouth, he set fire to an admixture of powders and salts in a tiny brazier, and bathed the corpse in pungent smoke that made Ferle’s eyes sting and water. He did this several times, burning various substances that produced various kinds of stink. The necromancer examined the corpse for signs invisible to Ferle. He had an air of imperturbable confidence, which conveyed that it was not terribly difficult to reanimate a corpse if one knew what one was doing. But after the fourth and particularly odious smoke bath, he did begin to seem ever so slightly perturbed.
Smoke collected under the ceiling, leaving a residual gritty pall that smelled like a tanner’s yard and tasted as foul. The mayor held a handkerchief over his nose. He blinked and blinked and tears oozed from his eyes. Ferle belatedly recalled that she was supposed to wave the peacock fan. She needed to cough and was trying hard not to.
The necromancer hovered over the corpse, his ear near the goodma’s lips. The corpse opened its mouth and a puff of gas issued forth. The necromancer straightened up quickly. “Ah!” he said, and turned to the mayor. “One question only, something that can be answered with a name or a yes or no, for the corpse was three days in the miller’s pond, and the shade is very far away and hard to reach.”
Far away and hard to reach! Ferle looked at the shade, and the shade looked straight back at her. For the first time Ferle wondered if her master was a liar.
“Let’s have it. Let’s have your question!” The necromancer was fairly hopping with impatience.
“My daughter has three suitors,” the mayor said, muffled by his handkerchief. “All fine young men, I’m sure you know them. There’s —,” and here he named three upstanding men (not all of them young), but as you can hardly be expected to remember all those names, I will not try your patience.
Necromancer Rahmik said, “What is the difficulty?”
“I simply can’t decide. Monsieur B_________ has magnificent prospects due to his cousin, the magistrate of Lyslee, and then there’s—”
“Never mind all that,” the necromancer said. He lit a new powder—this one smelled like burning mildew—and wafted it under the corpse’s nose. “Which suitor should the mayor choose?” he asked the corpse.
The corpse croaked something.
“What? What?” both men said.
Then, in syllables widely separated and without inflection, the corpse said, “The . . . one . . . who . . .
had . . . her.”
“The one who had her?” the mayor said. “Impossible! No man can get near her, I’ve seen to that.”
The necromancer gave a slight shrug, as if to say it was pointless to contradict the dead. But the mayor continued to fume. “Why, if I thought a fellow had been at her, I’d rather run him through than let them wed! And which fellow? Why doesn’t the goodma say which fellow it is?”
The necromancer asked, but the corpse was silent. Meanwhile the shade watched the proceedings as if she had nothing to do with them and did not approve. She went on shifting the stones in her lap, building a small cairn and then moving her legs so that the cairn tumbled. Building a cairn again.
“Dear me,” the necromancer said. “I believe that’s all we’re going to get. Perhaps you had better ask your daughter.”
“Absurd!” the mayor said. “That’s no sort of answer.”
“That’s as may be,” said Necromancer Rahmik, bowing and prying the mayor out of the chair. “But you must marry her off as quick as you can, and might as well choose the most enterprising young man, eh? He must be a nimble and clever sort of fellow, quite suitable for a son-in-law. No harm done when no one knows, as they say.”
Ferle had forgotten her duties again. Her master poked her with his sharp elbow, and she curtseyed when she was supposed to bow, and led the mayor away.
In the drawing room she collected the next patron, Monsieur Donnatz, the wealthiest cloth merchant in Lynka (a town known far and wide for its woolens). Monsieur Donnatz was dressed in the height of Abigoman fashion, which is to say the cut of his waistcoat would not have seemed out of place in Uberunder twenty years before. His shoes had high heels that tick-tocked down the tiled floor of the corridor.
“Ah, Monsieur Donnatz,” said the necromancer. “The usual question?”
Monsieur Donnatz perched on the chair and nodded.
As before, the necromancer took no notice whatever of the suicide’s shade, and applied himself diligently to producing odiferous smokes and questioning the corpse.
“Is Madame Donnatz entirely faithful to her husband?” he asked.
“Yes,” said the corpse, with a gust of fetid gas.
“That’s too much. That’s really too much!” the shade of Goodma Gaitho said indignantly, breaking her silence at last. “That woman! Everyone knows she took up with Captain Z_____ after jilting Captain S_______. What will she do when she finishes with the officers, eh?”
Ferle led Monsieur Donnatz down the corridor, sneaking a glance at him as they went. Could he not hear the shade shouting that his wife would work her way through the barracks next? But the cloth merchant looked thoroughly smug.
“Don’t listen to her, Ferle,” Grandma Lialel’s shade said as they passed by. “She hasn’t been dead long, and she knows no more than she did alive. It’s just what all the gossips say about Madame Donnatz.”
Then why was the goodma’s shade so angry? Ferle wanted to ask. But she refrained. It was no part of her duties.
Next she escorted Monsieur Marris to the office. He asked if a certain widow would welcome him to her bed—he’d caught her looking at him twice in church last Sunday. The corpse said yes, and he too left the chamber looking smug, or as smug as a man can look when he is sneezing.
But the shade had contradicted the corpse, saying the widow had no doubt stared at Monsieur Marris in loathing, because he was a vain, puffed up toad, and by now it was plain to Ferle that Goodma Gaitho’s corpse, animated by animalcules as it might be, and speaking by way of expulsions of gas, had nothing to do with her shade. And vice versa.
And there was no denying it: The necromancer and his patrons were oblivious to the shade of Gaitho Marlem. They could neither see nor hear her. Perhaps (could it be?) all the shades who cluttered the rooms and hallways of the necromancer’s house were likewise invisible to everyone but Ferle. Which would explain why people walked through them—not from an excess of politeness, or even rudeness, but from ignorance.
Another child might have deduced all this ages ago, but then most children pay more attention to their elders than Ferle, and learn a thing or two while they are growing up.
Ferle had a strange sensation as she reasoned this out. Usually her thinking was all in a snarl, like wool threads after the cat has got into the basket of bobbins, but now she had hold of one thought and was pulling it free, and she felt that if she pulled hard enough she might understand the whole knotty business of just about everything. (Which only shows how mistaken she was. If you have tried pulling on one end of a tangled thread, you will know it only makes knots that are impossible to undo.)
The shade of Grandma Lialel followed Ferle down the hall wi
th a loud swishing of skirts that no one else seemed to hear. “Hold your tongue, girl,” Grandma said, so Ferle kept her unraveling conclusions to herself.
Each time Ferle escorted a new patron to the chamber, the air was more noxious. She didn’t want to breathe it, and held her breath as long as she could, but when she was obliged to breathe she gasped, and when she gasped she coughed. The necromancer reprimanded her, though he coughed too. His eyes were bloodshot, and his skin had turned yellow and shiny as a beeswax candle.
The patrons asked their questions: “Has my grandfather willed his land in Lyslee to me or my brother?” or “Will my wife give birth to a son?” or “Does Monsieur H_______ intend to cheat me?” And, quite often, “Is my wife faithful?” A few patrons got no answers; a few got answers not to their liking. But most went away with an air of complacency, having found out that their suspicions were confirmed or their desires would be gratified.
Meanwhile Gaitho Marlem’s shade grew more and more irate. She kept up a muttering punctuated every now and then with shouting. She called the men barnyard names: mongrel cur, lummox of an ox, lard-witted boar—and Ferle couldn’t help but see the men as the goodma had named them, for the cur skulked, the ox lumbered, and the boar had bristles and wore a waistcoat tight as a sausage skin.
Ferle brought yet another cloth merchant to the office and found Necromancer Rahmik in a chair, dabbing sweat from his brow with his lace cuff. “This is the last one,” he said to Ferle, when the merchant’s question had been answered. “Give the rest my regrets, for no more can be done tonight.”
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 31 Page 11