by Sean Wallace
“You don’t look like a wizard,” he said.
I owed myself two nomismata. “I’m not a wizard,” I said.
I always say that.
“But we sent to the Fathers for a—”
“I’m not a wizard,” I repeated, “I’m a philosopher. There’s no such thing as wizards.”
He frowned. “We sent to the Fathers for a wizard,” he said.
I have this little speech. I can say it with my eyes shut, or thinking about something else. It comes out better if I’m not thinking about what I’m saying. I tell them, we’re not wizards, we don’t do magic, there’s no such thing as magic. Rather, we’re students of natural philosophy, specializing in mental energies, telepathy, telekinesis, indirect vision. Not magic; just science where we haven’t quite figured out how it works yet. I looked at him. His hood and coat were homespun – that open, rather scratchy weave you get with moorland wool. The patches were a slightly different color; I guessed they’d been salvaged from an even older coat that had finally reached the point where there was nothing left to sew on to. The boots had a military look. There had been battles in these parts, thirty years ago, in the civil war. The boots looked to be about that sort of vintage. Waste not, want not.
“I’m kidding,” I said. “I’m a wizard.”
He looked at me, then back at the road. I hadn’t risen in his estimation, but I hadn’t sunk any lower, probably because that wasn’t possible. I waited for him to broach the subject.
By my reckoning, three miles out of town, I said, “So tell me what’s been happening.”
He had big hands; too big for his wrists, which looked like bones painted flesh-color. “The Brother wrote you a letter,” he said.
“Yes,” I replied brightly. “But I want you to tell me.”
The silence that followed was thought rather than rudeness or sulking. Then he said, “No good asking me. I don’t know about that stuff.”
They never want to talk to me. I have to conclude that it’s my fault. I’ve tried all sorts of different approaches. I’ve tried being friendly, which gets you nowhere. I’ve tried keeping my face shut until someone volunteers information, which gets you peace and quiet. I’ve read books about agriculture, so I can talk intelligently about the state of the crops, milk yields, prices at market, and the weather. When I do that, of course, I end up talking to myself. Actually, I have no problem with talking to myself. In the country, it’s the only way I ever get an intelligent conversation.
“The dead man,” I prompted him. I never say the deceased.
He shrugged. “Died about three months ago. Never had any bother till just after lambing.”
“I see. And then?”
“It was sheep to begin with,” he said. “The old ram, with its neck broke, and then four ewes. They all reckoned it was wolves, but I said to them, wolves don’t break necks, it was something with hands did that.”
I nodded. I knew all this. “And then?”
“More sheep,” he said, “and the dog, and then an old man, used to go round all the farms selling stuff, buttons and needles and things he made out of old bones; and when we found him, we reckoned we’d best tell the boss up at the grange, and he sent down two of his men to look out at night, and then the same thing happened to them. I said, that’s no wolf. Knew all along, see. Seen it before.”
That hadn’t been in the letter. “Is that right?” I said.
“When I was a kid,” the man said (and now I knew the problem would be getting him to shut up). “Same thing exactly: sheep, then travelers, then three of the Duke’s men. My grandad, he knew what it was, but they wouldn’t listen. He knew a lot of stuff, Grandad.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Him and me and my cousin from out over, we got a couple of shovels and a pick and an ax, and we went and dug up this old boy who’d died. And he was all swelled up, like he’d got the gout all over, and he was purple, like a grape. So we cut off his head and shoveled all the dirt back, and we dropped the head down an old well, and that was the end of that. No more bother. Didn’t say what we’d done, mind. The Brother wouldn’t have liked it. Funny bugger, he was.”
Well, I thought. “You did the right thing,” I said. “Your grandfather was a clever man, obviously.”
“That’s right,” he said. “He knew a lot of stuff.”
I was doing my mental arithmetic. When I was a kid – so, anything from fifty-five to sixty years ago. Rather a long interval, but not unheard of. I was about to ask if anything like it had happened before then, but I figured it out just in time. If wise old Grandfather had known exactly what to do, it stood to reason he’d learned it the old-fashioned way: watching or helping, quite possibly more than once.
“The man who died,” I said.
“Him.” A cartload of significance crammed into that word. “Offcomer,” he explained.
“Ah,” I said.
“Schoolteacher, he called himself,” he went on. “Dunno about that. Him and the Brother, they tried to get a school going, to teach the boys their letters and figuring and all, but I told them, waste of time in these parts, you can’t spare a boy in summer, and winter, it’s too dark and cold to be walking five miles there and five miles back, just to learn stuff out of a book. And they wanted paying, two pence twice a year. People around here can’t afford that for a parcel of old nonsense.”
I thought of my own childhood, and said nothing. “Where did he come from?”
“Down south.” Well, of course he did. “I said to him, you’re a long way from home. He didn’t deny it. Said it was his calling, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
It was dark by the time we reached the farm. It was exactly what I’d been expecting: long and low, with turf eaves a foot off the ground, turf walls over a light timber frame. No trees this high up, so lumber had to come up the coast on a big shallow-draught freighter as far as Holy Trinity, then road haulage the rest of the way. I spent the first fifteen years of my life sleeping under turf, and I still get nightmares.
Mercifully, the Brother was there waiting for me. He was younger than I’d anticipated – you always think of village Brothers as craggy old fat men, or thin and brittle, like dried twigs with papery bark. Brother Stauracius couldn’t have been much over thirty; a tall, broad-shouldered man with an almost perfectly square head, hair cropped short like winter pasture, and pale-blue eyes. Even without the habit, nobody could have taken him for a farmer.
“I’m so glad you could come,” he said, town voice, educated, rather high for such a big man. He sounded like he meant it. “Such a very long way. I hope the journey wasn’t too dreadful.”
I wondered what he’d done wrong, to have ended up here. “Thank you for your letter,” I said.
He nodded, genuinely pleased. “I was worried, I didn’t know what to put in and leave out. I’m afraid I’ve had no experience with this sort of thing, none at all. I’m sure there must be a great deal more you need to know.”
I shook my head. “It sounds like a textbook case,” I said.
“Really.” He nodded several times, quickly. “I looked it up in Statutes and Procedures, naturally, but the information was very sparse, very sparse indeed. Well, of course. Obviously, this sort of thing has to be left to the experts. Further detail would only encourage the ignorant to meddle.”
I thought about Grandfather: two shovels and an ax, job done. But not quite, or else I wouldn’t be here. “Fine,” I said. “Now, you’re sure there were no other deaths within six months of the first attack.”
“Quite sure,” he said, as though his life depended on it. “Nobody but poor Anthemius.”
Nobody had asked me to sit down, let alone take my wet boots off. The hell with it. I sat down on the end of a bench. “You didn’t say what he died of.”
“Exposure.” Brother Stauracius looked very sad. “He was caught out in a snowstorm and froze to death, poor man.”
“Near here?”
“Actually, n
o.” A slight frown, like a crack in a wall. “We found him about two miles from here, as it happens, on the big pasture between the mountains and the river. A long way from anywhere, so presumably he lost his way in the snow and wandered about aimlessly until the cold got to him.”
I thought about that. “On his way back home, then.”
“I suppose so, yes.”
I needed a map. You almost always need a map, and there never is one. If ever I’m emperor, I’ll have the entire country surveyed and mapped, and copies of each parish hung up in the temple vestries. “I don’t suppose it matters,” I lied. “You’ll take me to see the grave.”
A faint glow of alarm in those watered-down eyes. “In the morning.”
“Of course in the morning,” I said.
He relaxed just a little. “You’ll stay here tonight, naturally. I’m afraid the arrangements are a bit—”
“I was brought up on a farm,” I said.
Unlike him. “That’s all right, then,” he said. “Now I suppose we should join our hosts. The evening meal is served rather early in these parts.”
“Good,” I said.
Sleeping under turf is like being in your grave. Of course, there are rafters. That’s what you see when you look up, lying wide-awake in the dark. Your eyes get the hang of it quite soon, diluting the black into gray into a palette of pale grays; you see rafters, not the underside of turf. And the smoke hardens it off, so it doesn’t crumble. You don’t get worms dropping on your face. But it’s unavoidable, no matter how long you do it, no matter how used you are to it. You lie there, and the thought crosses your mind as you stare at the underside of grass; is this what it’ll be like?
The answer is, of course, no. First, the roof will be considerably lower; it’ll be the lid of a box, if you’re lucky enough to have one, or else no roof at all, just dirt chucked on your face. Second, you won’t be able to see it because you’ll be dead.
But you can’t help wondering. For a start, there’s temperature. Turf is a wonderful insulator: keeps out the cold in winter and the heat in summer. What it doesn’t keep out is the damp. It occurs to you as you lie on your back there: so long as they bury me in a thick shirt, won’t have to worry about being cold, or too hot in summer, but the damp could be a problem. Gets into your bones. A man could catch his death.
It’s while you’re lying there – everybody else is fast asleep; no imagination, no curiosity, or they’ve been working so hard all day they just sleep, no matter what – that you start hearing the noises. Actually, turf’s pretty quiet. Doesn’t creak like wood, gradually settling, and you don’t get drips from leaks. What you get is the thumping noises over your head. Clump, clump, clump, then a pause, then clump, clump, clump.
They tell you, when you’re a kid and you ask, that it’s the sound of dead men riding the roof-tree. They tell you that dead men get up out of the ground, climb up on the roof, sit astride the peak, and jiggle about, walloping their heels into the turf like a man kicking on a horse. You believe them; I never was quite sure whether they believed it themselves. When you’re older, of course, and you’ve left the farm and gone somewhere civilized, where it doesn’t happen, you finally figure it out: what you hear is sheep, hopping up on to the roof in the night, wandering about grazing the fine sweet grass that grows there, picking out the wild leeks, of which they’re particularly fond. Sheep, for crying out loud, not dead men at all. I guess they knew really, all along, and the stuff about dead men was to keep you indoors at night, keep you from wandering out under the stars (though why you should want to I couldn’t begin to imagine). Or at least, at some point, way back in the dim past, some smartass with a particularly warped imagination made up the story about dead men, to scare his kids; and the kids believed, and never figured it was sheep, and they told their kids, and so on down the generations. Maybe you never figure it out unless you leave the farm, which nobody ever does, except me.
As a matter of fact, I was just beginning to drift off into a doze when the thumping started. Clump, clump, clump; pause; clump, clump, clump. I was not amused. I was bone-tired and I really wanted to get some sleep, and here were these fucking sheep walking about over my head. The hell with that, I thought, and got up.
I opened the door as quietly as I could, not wanting to wake up the household, and I stood in the doorway for a little while, letting my eyes get used to the dark. Someone had left a stick leaning against the doorframe. I picked it up, on the off chance that there might be a sheep close enough to hit.
Something was moving about again. I walked away from the house until I could see up top.
It wasn’t sheep. It was a dead man.
He was sitting astride the roof, his legs drooping down either side, like a farmer on his way back from the market. His hands were on his hips and he was looking away to the east. He was just a dark shape against the sky, but there was something about the way he sat there: peaceful. I didn’t think he’d seen me, and I felt no great inclination to advertise my presence. If I say I wasn’t scared, I wouldn’t expect to be believed; but fear wasn’t uppermost in my mind. Mostly, I was interested.
No idea how long I stood and he sat. It occurred to me that I was just assuming he was a dead man. Looked at it logically, far more likely that he was alive, and had reasons of his own for climbing up on a roof in the middle of the night. Well, there’s a time and a place for logic.
He turned his head, looking down the line of the roof-tree, and lifted his heels, and dug them into the turf three times: clump, clump, clump. (And that was when I realized the flaw in my earlier rationalization. Three clumps; always three, ever since I was a kid. How many three-legged sheep do you see?) At that moment, the moon came out from behind the clouds, and suddenly we were looking at each other, me and him.
My host had been right: he was purple, like a grape. Or a bruise; the whole body one enormous bruise. Swollen, he’d said; either that or he was an enormous man, arms and legs twice as thick as normal. His eyes were white; no pupils.
“Hello,” I said.
He leaned forward just a little and cupped his hand behind his left ear. “You’ll have to speak up,” he said.
Words from a dead man; a purple, swollen man sitting astride a roof.
“Tell me,” I said, raising my voice. “Why do you do that?”
He looked at me, or a little bit past me. I couldn’t tell if his mouth moved, but there was a deep, gurgling noise that could only have been laughter. “Do what?”
“Ride on the roof like it’s a horse,” I said.
His shoulders lifted; a slow, exaggerated shrug, like he didn’t know what a shrug was but was copying one he’d seen many years ago. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I feel the urge to do it, so I do it.”
Well, I thought, one of the great abiding mysteries of my childhood not quite cleared up. “Are you Anthemius?” I asked. “The schoolmaster?”
Again the laugh. “That’s a very good question,” he said. “Tell you what,” he went on, “come up here and sit with me, so we can talk without yelling.”
In the moonlight, I could make out the huge hands, with their monstrous overripe fingers. How tight the skin would have to be, with all that pressure against it from the inside. Breaking a neck would be like snapping a pear off a tree.
“Let me rephrase that,” I said. “Were you Anthemius? When you were—”
“Yes,” he said, speaking quickly to cut off a word he didn’t want to hear. “I think I was. Thank you,” he added. “I’ve been trying to remember. It’s been on the tip of my tongue, but somehow I can’t seem to think of any names.”
The approved procedure for coping with the restless dead is, essentially, what Grandfather did; though of course we make rather more of a fuss about it. The approved procedure should, needless to say, be carried out in daylight; noon is recommended. Should you chance to encounter a specimen during the night, there are two courses of action, both recommended rather than approved. One, you draw your sword
and cut its head off. Two, you challenge it to the riddle game and keep it talking all night, until dawn comes up unexpectedly and strands it like a beached whale in the cruel light.
Commentary on that. I am not a man of action. I don’t vault on to roofs, I don’t carry weapons. One of the reasons I left the farm in the first place was I have trouble lifting even moderate loads. So much for option one; and as for option two . . .
Also, I was curious. Interested.
“What happened to you?” I said.
“You know, I’m really not sure,” he replied; and the voice was starting to sound like a man’s voice, my ears were getting the hang of it, the way my eyes had got used to the dark. “I know I was out in the snow and I’d lost my way. I got terribly cold, so that every bit of me hurt. Then the pain started to ease up, and I sort of fell asleep.”
“You died,” I said.
He didn’t like me saying that, but I guess he forgave me. “I remember waking up,” he said, “and it was pitch dark and terribly quiet, and I couldn’t move. I was very scared. And then it occurred to me, I wasn’t breathing. I don’t mean I was holding my breath. I wasn’t breathing at all, and it didn’t matter. So then I knew.”
I waited, but I hadn’t got all night. “And then?”
He turned his head away. No hair, just a bulging purple scalp. A head like a plum. “I was terrified,” he said. “I mean, I had no way of knowing.” He paused, and I have no idea what was passing through his mind. “After a long time, I found I could move after all. I got my hands up against the lid, and I pushed, and I could feel the wood burst apart. That scared me even more, I thought the roof, I mean all the earth on top of me, I thought it’d cave in and bury me.” He paused again. “I was always frightened of tight places,” he said. “You know.”
I nodded. Me too, as it happens.
“I guess I panicked,” he went on, “because I kept pushing, and I somehow knew that I was incredibly strong, much stronger than I’d ever been before, so I thought, if I push hard enough. I wasn’t thinking straight, of course.”