LIGHTNING’S CHAPTER
My own daughter just Challenged me! In front of the Circle and the Emperor-and my lady Eleonora! I think I’m burning up. By god, by god. What has she turned into? With all I’ve done for her! Try as I might, rack my brains as I do, I can’t think what I could have done better. Does she think I don’t love her?-I would have changed the world for her! May the rivers Mica, Dace and Moren flood the world and drown it if she ever had cause for a fraction of one complaint.
I have failed, for her to turn out like this. I don’t know how. Yes, I do. I have not spent enough time with her. First there was the swarm and then Tris and-why can’t she be patient?
The girl is my just deserts for being a damn fool. I went against my nature with Ata; I didn’t really love her. She sent for me and I found her sitting, sobbing at her table on the ship. Such a strong woman should never be driven to tears. I put an arm around her to comfort her…fool that I am.
I must have spoilt Cyan. Yes. Yes, that’s true. My pampering her desires must have led her to think she can demand the world…How dare she?…She doesn’t realise that worlds are hard to come by.
By god, I haven’t been this angry since…since my family spilt. We all make errors, there’s no need to keep castigating myself about that. Yes, the little mistakes made by princes are devastating on account of our power.
Who has she been talking to, to turn out so badly? It must be the effect of Hacilith and that rotten brood of Ata’s. Cyan always seemed all right before, but now delinquency hangs around her like a cloud of perfume. I used to love her innocence. She might have been an accident, but she woke me up. A year feels like a year now, rather than ten minutes. I’m alive again-or becoming so-I’m experiencing more now in a year with her than I did in a century before. She invigorated me…more, far more, than even Swallow could. Damn it, I even wished I could be like her.
Do I have to give up my own daughter like I’ve given up everyone else? No, wait. Take a breath. Step back from this-you know you can, there’s been worse-and think. In a way she has played into my hands. I have a…a legitimate way of dealing with her. She isn’t familiar with the procedures of Challenges. I did the right thing; I’m free of her for the time being and I can talk to her later, at my convenience…I am sure she will be very repentant.
The way she has turned out is not my fault. Events swept me along too quickly to make time for her…I regret not having the pressure of time that mortals do. Promises are made; time passes and sometimes they are not properly kept. Reality intrudes on the best of intentions: doesn’t every arrow that flies feel the pull of the earth? But, damn it, I have my duty; I can’t neglect it. I knew she was growing quickly, but millions of things demanded my attention…Swallow should have been more dutiful herself.
But no. When an archer misses the mark, he should turn and look for the fault within himself. A failure to hit the target is never the fault of the target.
The world is becoming too crass. Oh, that old refrain: everywhere is similar, and becoming more so. In the time that reared me the Grand Tour only took us around Awia, and it startled and inspired us. Now the Tour takes our sons and daughters thousands of kilometres and shows them four lands in the space of a year, and they return unimpressed.
I am fighting to protect the very ideals that Cyan is trying to change, and…oh, what is the bloody point? I’m sure in the past I never had to justify my every move. There is an informality, these days, that causes uncertainty; nobody knows how to behave any more. It was easier when there were proper codes of behaviour…I am too old and inflexible to bear this blow. Old armour splits; only soft jackets withstand sword blows.
Don’t talk rubbish.
The world is changing, though. Changing radically, in ways I don’t care to understand. And what will I be left with? A sense of nostalgia, for the rest of my life in long centuries to come. A terrible sense that I have missed the only thing worthwhile. Be steady, keep calm. Where are the nerves of steel I have when Insects are charging at me and I have to wait for my range?
I walked more slowly because a recent, mostly healed, rapier wound in my back was starting to catch. I passed into a deep shadow and looked about me, perturbed. I had come as far as the outer road. I must have paced across the square and three streets completely oblivious.
The tower of the gatehouse overshadowed the barrack blocks on my either side. Soldiers smoking outside on their steps were staring at me in surprise, curious at the sight of Lightning striding down the street in his shirt sleeves.
I passed them, then I stopped dead. The banner of Morenzia was flying above the barrack doorway. A red clenched fist. The red fist: the marriage rite. The Hacilith fyrd must have assembled, one part of my mind observed, but with the sight of the flag my other thoughts winged far away, to Savory. My Savory. Cyan was wrong to taunt me about her. If she knew what happened she wouldn’t dare to mention Savory at all.
The wind gusted and the flag flapped, pulling its cord through its eye hole. It released me from my trance and I looked down, aware I was touching the scar across my right palm, rubbing it with my left thumb and forefinger. I turned and walked slowly back to my room. The civilised parts of Morenzia don’t conduct the blood-red hand ceremony any more, only the people of Cathee still do, but the country has kept it as their device. I am so used to seeing it, it hardly registers, but occasionally when I am pensive I look a little deeper and the realisation of what it means takes me back to Savory. And again I am in the marriage hut, waiting for nightfall.
I was in the marriage hut, waiting for nightfall. The hut walls were wattle hurdles woven around living trees; I sat on the floor and looked up to the beams of the round roof, constructed in spirals like a spider’s web. Through the smoke hole at the apex I watched folds in the clouds push against one another. The dusk sky was different shades of old gold like the mixture in a bottle of illuminator’s ink.
After dark she will call me, if she hasn’t had second thoughts, celebrating in the village all day with her friends and family. I heard their laughter as they dressed her up and drank to her, and asked her over and over, as is their custom, if she’s sure, if she’s really sure. Soon I will know if they have managed to sway her conviction; if I stay here well into the night and she fails to call me, then without a word I will go to the trader I had employed as a guide and leave the dense forest.
Outside was nothing but pine trees behind pine trees all the way up and over the fir-covered ridges of the vast mountain forest of Cathee. Cathee could not be more different from my hunting woods I loved so well; it was dark; it was trackless; it was wild. For hundreds of kilometres from Vertigo town to the Drag Road, from the clay paddy fields of Litanee to the cliffs of the cape there were only trees. Even at the edges where conifers segued into broadleaf forest it lost none of its impenetrability.
I had fasted in the marriage hut for twenty-four hours, alone, and I was expected to use that time to think about Savory and whether I wanted to marry her. I did with all my heart; Savory, when she called me, would never find the hut door swinging wide and her groom long gone.
Love filled me and uplifted me. I was intoxicated; I floated; I was full of love. After so long I was about to be married! Completed-as I had never felt complete before. I had always felt as if something was missing. I had always felt unfinished, but two people living together as one is to be complete. Savory did not have wings, so we would not be able to tangle our pinions together and I would not be able to bury my face in the warm, feather-scent in their pits, or stroke my fingers along their serried rows. They couple in a vulgar way, do humans, face to face rather than belly to back, but then my cousin Martyn and I used to throw ourselves on each other that way, when she had the key to the belvedere, or with excitement after the day’s hunt. The smell of deer blood, oiled armour, dry leaves, the perspiration of our eager flesh…It would be strange at first to have a woman without wings, but then it would be strange, so strange, to have a companion at all.
The beauty of it-waiting outside in a far place, for my love to call me, while sunset dyed the sky strange colours and the light drained out of the forest. I wanted to tell her all my history-the past to be discussed in the future-we would have so much time!
I glanced up as the first wolf howls carried on the breeze. The Cathee grey wolves were dumb lanky beasts with dirty pelts and eyes glazed by starvation. They scavenged in large packs and scratched ancient things out of the villages’ middens. The few villages sheltered from them behind circular palisades, but I had my new crossbow and I was not afraid. The worst they could do was give me fleas.
I could hear distant laughter from the village and I felt ostracised, but it would be worth it when they throw open their gates and Savory leads me in, when they accept me as one of their own.
I wondered what Mother would think of that. I found it easy to picture her face, even after all these centuries. Son, she would say, do you know what you are doing? She has no fine blood whatsoever.
That never mattered to me.
You just picked her out of the ranks!
I always knew I would meet my true love on the battlefield.
She is probably not even a virgin. Some fyrdsman or woodcutter will have taken her en passant.
Oh, let me marry whom I love.
Mother raises her eyebrows: Ah, but is she your true love or your latest substitute?
She is my true love, and besides, she has the strong will I admire and she is my equal in intelligence. I am immortal and I need someone of whom I will never tire.
Son, immortal or not, you vex me. What are you thinking of, participating in barbarous rituals?
True, I had always assumed I would be married our way, but Savory wanted this, and the way she explained the ritual seemed to be more deeply binding than anything invented in Awia and the Plains. Back home, bride and groom simply stand at the front of the audience and together proclaim, ‘We are married.’ To undo the union is just as simple a procedure, but there could be no separation when Savory and I are wed. This was to be her last visit to her homeland, and I agreed to the suggestion with delight, although later that night her face seemed strangely clouded. I would not have denied her anything. I was determined to know everything about her, and become familiar with her circumstances, the places that she had known and loved. I wished I had met her earlier, and I knew too little about her and the Cathee, but I thought I could learn quickly through taking part. I fretted; where is she? Surely it’s nightfall. Why hasn’t she called me?
Powders for preening feathers were not imported this far south, so I felt rather unwashed. I fiddled with the red plaid cloak they had given me, because it kept slipping down. The rough wool was unbearably scratchy and I was not at all sure that I had folded it correctly.
I first saw Savory-the doyenne of hoydens-at the front, sitting on a bench outside a pavilion, waxing her bowstring. I was struck that moment by love’s arrows, and they sank their barbs deep beneath my skin. The first arrow was her beauty; it entered through my eyes and from there to my heart, where nothing I could do would extract it. The second was her simplicity, her few belongings, her careless mode of life. Like all the Cathee she lived within her skin as if it was someone else’s coat she may well have to pawn for her next meal. The third arrow was my own memory, of Martyn, because Savory had the same fox-red hair. Unbraided, it tumbled on her shoulders, pooled on her lap. Its tips brushed the backs of her knees as she sat with one leg over the other, massaging linseed oil into the risers of her bow. From that instant I was her willing servant; my heart belonged unreservedly to her.
Savory had seen the seasons, slept outdoors and laboured hard. Martyn, on the other hand, had skin as pale and clean as split sycamore wood. Martyn was taller than any forester and Savory did not have her upright bearing, but Savory’s sparkling, little-girl lightness shone through her experience of harsh realities-like cultivated flowers in a garden grown wild.
Savory had left Morenzia owing to a blood feud between her family and another in the village. It had whittled down her family until she was the last. The forest had nothing wholesome to offer her, so she joined the fyrd and led a division of Cathee woodsmen, the best archers outside Awia. I pieced this together from her broken language, because I could not speak Morenzian. I yearned for a word that we could share, that might begin our courtship, and for agonising weeks I stayed silent and watched from afar.
She taught me her language over six months, though I remained hesitant and only Savory could fathom my accent. She had heard of Lightning in old legends, but they were rarely accurate and she only half-believed they were about me. I tried to impress upon her how different her life would be from now on but, having never seen my palace, how could she understand? She was strong enough to break through my reserve. After all, it had been a hundred years since I had…
I loved her the more because she did not hang back, afraid. Her antics made me laugh. She was not so headstrong as to ignore my sincere advances. Neither was she afraid of the depth of my devotion, retreating into reserve of her own. She reciprocated. I would have given her roses if we hadn’t been stranded at the front. She would have found herself with half of my estate. So then, I asked her to marry me, as composedly as I was able, although I felt like froth inside, like bubbles in Stenasrai wine.
She hung on my arm and looked up, all smiles as she consented. She did love me as I loved her! If perfection blooms only once in a thousand years, that’s enough, because I can pick that bloom and it will live the next thousand years too, and on into forever. Constancy is rewarded, I know that much.
‘Saker!’ Her voice broke the silence. It rang out with confidence above the rustle of roosting birds. ‘Saker Micawater!’ She called me to the stone. I rearranged the uncomfortable cloak one last time and hurried out.
Savory stood outside next to the cup-and-ring stone. She was an indistinct figure in the dusk, her hands and face pale patches. As I drew nearer I saw her face was painted with henna: red dots with concentric circles on both her cheeks. Her hair hung in long red braids either side of her face. A plaid cloak pinned at her shoulders reached the ground, and beneath, a short simple cambric dress with a girdle. On her forearms and lower legs she wore half-armour for me. The glittering vambraces and greaves showed her limbs’ slender curves. The contrast between the hard, warm metal and her soft yielding skin made me desperate to touch her. All along her arms and legs she had daubed the double black stripes of Cathee war paint and her first two fingers were still stained from where she had dipped them and drawn them over her skin.
The dark and glossy smell of wet pine needles was all around, acidic and medicinal, almost like liquorice. The trees’ straight boles stood close together as if at attention. Above them, a crescent moon hung like a cutlass in a sky so dark blue it appeared purple.
The cup-and-ring stone was as tall as my chest, a natural rock pushing up from the soil and penny-coloured fallen needles. It was rough-grained and uneven at the edges. The cup-and-ring had been carved on its sloping top many centuries ago, Savory had said, perhaps even before the Empire was established. Though privately I doubted that it could be so old.
In the centre was a shallow round cup, surrounded by five concentric rings, the pattern you see if you drop a pebble in the lake. The carvings had long since taken on the red rock’s patina. From the cup in the centre a channel had been carved, deeper as it cut through the rings, to the edge of the rock. The cup was therefore a tiny basin with a drainage conduit.
I did not study it for long. I only had eyes for my painted warrior bride, and she smiled at me but we must not speak a word. My heart beat fast and I was suffused with warmth and exultation. I would take her from here to the Castle to kiss the Emperor’s hand and then we would live together forever!
Savory drew her skinning knife from her belt scabbard. It had been polished and it gleamed. She raised her right hand, the fingers spread wide, the vulnerable palm showing. She pressed the point to the ball of her thumb and it slid under her skin. A dark stripe sprang up. Blood ran shining, down her wrist. Savory fisted her hand and dripped it into the hollow of the cup.
She passed the knife to me with a solemn nod. I did not take it: the occasion required a grander gesture. I drew my short sword and held it horizontally. Savory’s eyes widened. Hastening to reassure her, I grasped the blade in front of me and slid my hand along it. I felt it bite. My signet ring zipped on the surface; my hand became warm and slick. A trail of blood shrank on the oiled metal into a thin line of crimson beads. I did not let the pain show on my face. I curled up my hand as she had done and let the drops fall into the cup until our blood, mixed together, breached the level, ran down the conduit and began dripping on the ground.
Quickly we held our wounded hands under the flow and felt drops patter on our cut palms.
Still separate, still without speaking, I yearned to hold her. The strength of my desire was close to desperation: I couldn’t go without touching her for any longer. She produced some cloth and bandaged my hand tenderly, and I bound hers.
She nodded. ‘Now we may speak.’
‘I love you,’ I said simply. I spread my wings completely around her. In our feathered sanctuary we found ourselves looking into each other’s eyes, and were trapped there. I whispered, ‘What would you have me do for you?’
She found it hard to say anything at all.
‘Kiss me.’
She tilted her head upward and touched my lips with hers. I smiled and returned the gesture. She took two handfuls of my cloak and pulled me down to the bloodstained grass. We consummated our marriage there.
Savory stepped happily, leading me along the meagre track. Hatchet nicks on tree trunks marked the way. Among the scuffed fallen needles, the forest’s myriad little white flowers had their petals closed.
We went through the gate and into the village. A huge bonfire was blazing in the middle of its clearing. The villagers rushed hand in hand in a boisterous, whirling dance around the fire, in and out of the houses in a long, crazed chain, wherever the maiden at the front chose to lead them. Their uncouth music flickered like a flame up and down an insensible scale; it seemed to have no timing, no beginning, no middle; it ended abruptly and started again. Seeing me staring, the guitarist grinned and plucked with his dirty fingers a most ideal arpeggio.
Some men were digging out a pit in which they’d roasted a wild boar. Five hours ago they had built a fire in a cobble-lined pit, let it burn to heat the stones, then put out the fire. They had laid in the carcass and buried it to cook. Now their spades scraped on hot cobbles, they thrust them underneath and lifted up the boar. They cheered and shovelled it out onto a trestle table. I caught a glimpse of golden crackling and flesh as brown and shining as mahogany. Whole branches of rosemary had been wrapped around it which had cooked onto the skin like fragile and blackened embroidery.
A delicious aroma drifted over. A shout went up, the chain of dancers broke and ran towards the roast pig. They crowded and shoved around the table.
Firelight pulsed and merged, making yellow and hollow beasts of their faces. They tore at the crunchy skin and ripped it away to the hot meat. Juices ran between their clawed fingers. They shoved it into their mouths-round black holes-and while they chewed, they flailed both hands to grab more. Boys and women turned away with fistfuls of stringy meat. Still more villagers arrived to join the frenzy. More and more came running and pressed themselves close around the table. Outside the circle of firelight the village lay empty. As the meat stripped away it became pinker, the white fat was bubbling. They dug their fingers into it, split the carcass apart. They dragged it up and down the table, opened it up. With a warm rip they detached a leg and they jostled into two clusters, a smaller group around the leg wiping it this way and that on the table top as they pulled off the shreds of flesh, holding them preciously until they had enough for a mouthful.
I felt awkward. I was ravenously hungry but was I expected to shoulder between them? I couldn’t bring myself to. I didn’t want to touch them.
The villagers drew back. They regarded the table: the bones lay stripped clean. Women shrugged and walked away, licking grease from their fingers. Such a show made me feel sick-they had taken less than five minutes to demolish the boar.
One man was so drunk he staggered towards the pit without seeing it in the darkness, a blacker rectangle on the shifting grey ground. He fell straight in. Then, finding the ashes still warm, he turned on his back looking satisfied up at the overcast sky and went to sleep.
A woodcutter at the table unbuckled his axe. He cracked open the bones with a few deft blows, and the villagers set to again on the marrow.
Savory jigged up to me, a succulent earthy smell of roast boar on her breath and an oily shine at the corners of her mouth. She had torn mouthfuls of it with her teeth. She looked surprised, then annoyed: ‘Didn’t you have any?’
‘I couldn’t get close.’
‘Ay! What will they think, that you haven’t tasted your own marriage feast?’
She lead me to the edge of the clearing, in front of their log cabins that all face inward. Some bear skins were spread on the damp grass in front of the reeve’s cabin.
‘Sit down there, my love; I’ll go and bring you some. Smoked pig, baked spuds and pine beer! Isn’t that a feast for an Awian lord?’ She kissed my cheek and ran lightly towards the smokehouse.
I watched the party. A travelling troupe were enacting a raucous play. The villagers still paid me little heed and took it to be as much for their benefit as for the bride and groom’s honour. That was of no consequence; I sat and watched happily. I couldn’t understand a word, but I recognised it as a familiar play based on an incident I remembered well. Some five hundred years ago, the Castle’s Master of Horse was beaten in a Challenge. He lost his place in the Circle but in the following years his devoted wife practised so much that she was able to beat the new incumbent and win immortality again for them both. Such is the strength of love.
In amongst the mummers, children kicked the embers for baked potatoes. I looked around at the few windowless log cabins, thatched with pine branches held down by netting. Big stone weights dangled from them, all carved in the shapes of animals: beavers, cockerels and squirrels. Every doorway had a beaming white plaster face mounted above it.
The reeve’s house was behind me and, on either side of its door, bas-relief sculptures of naked women adjoined the wall. They were life-sized in smooth plaster, so white they seemed to glow.
By the woodpile a big cooking pot hung on a thick chain from a tripod. It was smeared with the remains of hide glue, in which boar nets had been dipped to make them stickier. The enormous twine nets were draped on A-frames. All Cathee villages trap wild boar and carry them to Vertigo to be salted, barrelled, and sold as salt pork to the caravels.
The play was ending and, as usual with dramas of that nature, my character turned up to sort everything out. I was smiling at the actor playing Lightning, when from the corner of my eye I saw two men at the far end of the clearing. They caught my attention because they were skulking at the edge of the firelight. They had a similarity; maybe a father and his grown son.
They began to walk purposefully towards the smokehouse. Was this part of the play? Their faces were masked with determination. As people noticed them, they fell silent and it stirred a sense of menace. I felt the crowd’s expectation. Should I be doing something?
The men walked behind the bonfire; its rising heat rippled their figures, and where they passed, people turned aside and the party fell silent. The villagers near me watched, fearful eyes most white and nostrils flared. The two men reached the smokehouse, and axes appeared in their hands! They were wearing cuirasses!
The blood feud! I jumped up and dashed into the reeve’s house. From the rack I grabbed my crossbow and a bandolier of bolts.
The backs of the axe men were disappearing through the smokehouse door. I frantically wound the cranequin, but my wound reopened and my hand shook badly. I raised the bow and shot at the father. The bolt snicked into the log wall; the man turned and looked at me, then ducked inside. I missed. I was struck stock-still in shock. I don’t miss. I never miss. I can’t remember the last time I missed!
I lost sight of him inside the smokehouse. There was no time to reload. I started to run to Savory, but a second later the men were out of the door. They tore across the clearing, eyes popping, fists punching in front of their chests. What had they done to her?
They passed some distance in front of me, their axes flashing in their hands. From their other hands dangled longbow strings. I had seen enough of the world to know they are used as garrottes.
I tried to spin the cranequin back but the strength had gone completely from my cut hand, as if it didn’t belong to me. Click-click, click-click was all I could get out of the damned mechanism as it rocked back and forth on one ratchet. The men had reached the gate. A woman of their family pulled it open. They sped into the forest and it swallowed them.
I yelled and sprinted into the smokehouse. Where was Savory? Hanging hams swung at my touch as I felt my way between the drying racks. My wife’s white dress was a spectral smudge. She lay face-down on the pressed earth floor. I knelt next to her. The back of her neck was cut across cleanly with one axe blow. There did not seem to be much blood.
I jumped up and dashed after the murderers. As I passed the bonfire I threw in the crossbow, in a flurry of yellow sparks. Who talked me into using that thing? If I had my longbow, I could have put seven arrows through them in the thirty seconds they took to cross my field of vision.
I dashed through the gate and into the prickly frustration of the forest’s edge. Their fleeing footsteps crackled far in front of me, deep between the trees. The cold leather of my sword grip was damp in my hand.
I saw pale flashes heading downhill. By god, the bastards were signalling at me! But it was only the reflection of the bonfire on their back plates and it soon vanished.
I found myself surrounded by a wall of fretted branches, hard cones, bending needles. They clutched my clothes but I pushed further and further in. Shadows and twigs looked like they could be…but they weren’t, when I got closer. I could hardly judge distances, over the nettles and around snarled brambles. Where the trees grew more densely packed, the ground was clear and springy with needles. I couldn’t see in the low space under the branches; it was pitch-black.
I ducked down and hesitated, trying to catch my breath. All was silent. The murderers could be anywhere; without faithful Lymer I would never find them. They had gone to earth, and even if I flushed them the forest was their world and they might have picked up longbows. I was more lost than I have ever been. I listened carefully, but I only heard wolf howls muted in the far distance.
The village’s bonfire backlit the trees. Numbly, I turned and stumbled to the palisade, to the clearing, and into the smokehouse, to Savory. Those craven murderers knew she could have beaten them, with her skinning knife and the desperation of self-defence, had they faced her. They had cut her down as she knelt to slice meat onto my plate.
As my dear wife fell she had upset a sack of kindling and there were pieces of bark all over her. I cleared them away and I turned her over. She was ghastly cold. I used my cloak for a pillow and closed her glazed hazel eyes gently. I kissed dear Savory.
The pointlessness of it unhinged me. I jumped up suddenly and ran out of the smokehouse, but the village was deserted. Everybody had bolted into their homes and wedged shut the boards serving as doors. ‘Savory is slain!’ I shouted. ‘Help me find the murderers!’
From inside came small sounds that told me they were busy with other tasks. They were hinting that I should stop causing a disturbance, stop bawling and go away. I stared around the clearing: the bonfire burnt down to a red ember murmur; a clutch of boar ribs on the table; an overturned cup on the bruised grass. Nothing indicated that minutes ago this had been a lively party.
I ran from cabin to cabin banging on the blank doors. ‘Help! Help me for god’s sake!’ But I could not speak the language properly; nor they mine. I hammered on the reeve’s door. ‘You know me, Asart! We must catch the murderers!’ No answer from within. I clapped my hand flat over the sun brooch on my shoulder. ‘In the Castle’s name, I’m her husband! Tell me who the murderers are! I’ll bring my fyrd! Damn you all-help me or I’ll raze this village to the ground!’
What was I doing here? Here in the back of beyond? I should never have come to this filthy, tree-dark province at all. These folk had no inkling of my power. My palace where one of their daughters would have lived was no more than a tale to them. They valued their murderous traditions more highly than the distant Castle itself. Here I was the foreigner and how could they understand? With all the time in eternity I would not get through to them! I lost my mind and I curled up, faint, beside the fire.
At first light people emerged from their houses and went about their daily chores as if nothing had happened. I lay on my stomach on the wet grass watching abstractedly. They spoke not a word of Savory. They shut the events away and went on with tapping sap and lathing wood. How could they-when the world was shattered?
Years of blood feuds had bred in them a toleration like a collective sickness of the mind. They were quiet and cowed, but acted as if the random murder was fair and justified. She had been, after all, a Savory. Father Savory killed Pannage and was killed by Pannage’s grandson. So it went on. So it still goes on today.
Day only truly dawned on the village when the sun rose above the trees and slanted its rays down into the little enclosure. The dew began to vanish, though it remained, grey and sparkling, in the cobwebs, the palisade’s shadow and each hovel’s woodpile.
Two men, their sleeves rolled back, went into the smokehouse and brought out Savory on a stretcher. She was naked. They had stripped her naked. I felt a jolt as if I had been punched. My legs went weak but I stumbled to her and tried to cover her body with the cloak. The men put their arms out and blocked me. She was a pale sculpture, she lay on her long hair like a pelt, as red as the hair on her legs and sex. I had last seen her naked when-I had kissed her thighs and breasts-their disrespect was too much for me. ‘I’ll take her back to Awia! I’ll place her in my tomb!’
My pleas were cut short by the high squeal of a fiddle and a flute. The door of the nearest cabin flung open and the troupe of mummers tumbled out. They started dancing! They began to dance the old, false story where the King of Morenzia steals the King of Awia’s wife and Awia raises its fyrd to bring her back. The dancers whirled furiously around Savory’s stretcher, stamping either side as they acted out the battle. The King of Awia was mock-stabbed by the human king, and he fell. The dancers all jumped on the fallen actor, their hands scrambling under his clothes. They brought out real human bones, all dry and painted black, and began to dance with them, clacking them together.
What did it mean? I had no idea but the dishonour was too much. I drew my sword and was about to set among them and slay every last man, when the reeve came out of his house.
He was wearing a mask. It was a human visage, of heavy white plaster, as if his own face had been smeared with thick paste, but for its blind eye sockets, in which were placed cowry shells. Their pursed toothy grooves made blind black lines. In the mouth of the mask real human teeth were set. No, not set: the mask was the front of a real skull, sawn off and covered in plaster. The rest of his clothes were normal and he came towards me walking confidently, as if he could see through some hidden contrivance in the mask.
Savory had introduced me to reeve Asart, the village leader, answerable to Lord Governor Aver-Falconet. He reports to Aver-Falconet’s steward twice a year. Why was he part of this abhorrent dance? Did Hacilith know? Did the Castle know? Of course they must, I wrested from myself. I am the only one ignorant of the Cathee, because nothing like this is written in the books of Awia’s libraries.
The rest of the village left their work or emerged from their cabins silently, as if at an agreed signal. The women in short shifts and rawhide aprons, the men in their plaids and breeches, they formed a silent queue behind the stretcher.
I stared around the log cabins, and now I could more clearly see their ornamentation. The heads above the doors were real skulls! They were covered in plaster, shells set in their eye sockets, and affixed with paste all around them to the surface of the logs. Their snaggling yellow teeth showed between carefully moulded lips.
I looked to the reeve’s house. The sculptures that I had taken to be women were whole articulated skeletons re-fleshed with plaster. It had flaked off here and there; I saw brittle weathered bone underneath. Their curves and features had been shaped, but where the breasts swelled over some woman’s ancient rib-cage, projecting instead of nipples from the plaster were the hooked and open beaks of vultures.
The reeve had by now left the gate and the rest were following. I stumbled behind, some distance from the rear of the procession. I had to see where they were taking Savory. The reeve, villagers and mummers still carrying bagpipes, flutes and bones pushed between the trees on a little-worn path, in complete silence.
We were walking uphill, but I could tell no more. All the forest looked the same to me and I could scarcely see it. My eyes were stinging, I was weeping freely, and trying to see through my tears as through an awash uneven glass. Savory was a white blur as the procession wound between the close phalanxes of dark green pines on either side. The twisting brambles at the trackside scratched me, held me back, and snatched loops of thread out of the damn plaid cloak.
At length we came to a clearing, and beyond the screen of trees I glimpsed a gigantic mound, grassed-over equally with the ground. It must be man-made because it was completely circular, some ten metres across and surrounded by flat black stones propped up against its circumference. Three huge undressed rocks at the front formed a portal, one resting horizontally on two uprights, from which a tunnel lined with slabs led into its lightless depths. A single stone, standing a metre in front of the entrance, obscured the passageway from my sight. I assumed this was their crude mausoleum, like my great family tomb, in which they would lay dear Savory, but the procession did not stop.
The villagers cast glances at the knoll as they passed by, with looks on their faces almost as if it reassured them-and even the reeve’s skull mask turned towards it for an instant.
The forest was now alive with birds cawing and skitterings in the undergrowth. I took the arm of the last man in the procession, who carried his toddler son on his shoulders: ‘What’s going on? Tell me, man!’
He shook me away with an angry sneer.
A great cloud of birds burst up out of the trees ahead, cracking through twigs and branches. They separated out; kites and buzzards began to circle but the big glossy ravens dropped back down into the tree tops further on.
A terrible stench of corruption rose with them and hit me with such strength I gagged. It was the fatty smell of putrefying human flesh, which I have often encountered on the battlefield. The villagers showed no concern. I pulled my handkerchief from my trouser pocket and pressed it over my nose.
We came up to a high log palisade, but the silence and the smell told me this was not another village. Its gate had a woman’s skeleton plastered to the centre. Its eye sockets shone dully with cowry shells and all its teeth were bared between open lips. Again, its breasts were sculpted with panting beaks instead of nipples.
The Cathee entered an enclosure where the short grass was free of saplings and in the centre a great wooden scaffold stood two metres high: a platform raised on six trunks stripped clean of bark. The top of the platform was not solid, it was a criss-cross of rough-hewn timbers. Shreds hung down between them. At first I thought the shreds were fabric but they did not move with the breeze. A large strip dangled through the grating, tasselled at the end-it was a human arm and hand.
They set down the stretcher next to the platform and gathered along it, standing in ragged fashion side by side. I remained in the shadow of the gate and watched.
The reeve stood by Savory’s head. She looked so peaceful, as if she was asleep, were it not for the outrage of her nakedness. The reeve climbed a rough ladder of logs, up to the platform and appeared high above us against the sky. He crossed towards the villagers looking up, but as he did so he accidentally kicked the arm. It was mostly bone, it swung and fell off, and up stirred the rank smell of carrion. My gorge rose and I hunched over and vomited. What were they doing to my wife? I fell to my knees and heaved again and again-till it hollowed me out.
They did not hand up the whole stretcher. There were no ropes nor pulley to raise it to the top of the platform with any sort of dignity. The two bearers just picked up Savory’s body, one holding her ankles, the other her upper arms. He grappled with handfuls of her hair. Stiffness had set in and they had to turn her body as they lifted her. I saw in a flash the pink line of her sex between her legs. The masked reeve bent and seized her round the ribs, manhandled her onto the platform and laid her down.
And then he descended and walked underneath the scaffold, beckoning the villagers to join him. They huddled together, bent over, and began to pick bones and teeth from among the grass. The women folded their skirts and gathered them inside, the men cradled handfuls. Up and down they walked in methodical lines as if harvesting, and any man who found two bones still articulated, pulled them apart with a twist and a yank.
They piled all the bones on the stretcher, and in silent procession like before, they carried the stretcher out past me, though I was on my knees and coughing up bile. I shrank from them but I had to follow or in their stony blindness they would have barred me in with the dead. The first few heavy ravens were swooping down with guttural calls from the trees to feed.
I trailed some distance behind the procession to the mouth of the burial mound. They stopped by its portal, in a semi-circle. The reeve and stretcher-bearers slipped behind the stone screen and into the tunnel. They must have intended to deposit the bones in there.
I had seen enough. I spat and turned away, deranged. I ran back to the village, where I took a bow, a quiver-full of arrows and a spade. If any of the Cathee had tried to stop me I would have cleaved his head in two with it.
So they would take Savory, my Savory, and leave her to rot, feed her to vermin, then jumble her bones with everyone else’s? So they wanted to obliterate her identity until no one could recognise her remains? So they were content to forget her unique, intriguing life? What did that mean? What sort of people scrub out the honour of their ancestors? Their disrespect tore at my heart, cracked open and bleeding inside me. Savory is still a person, still my love. What is she to the Cathee? An empty vessel? No longer a woman, just an object that’s part of their past, that they will place with the rest and tidy away so life can go on? My life could not go on. My life had stopped. I thought of what we Awians do, with our glass carriages drawn by ebony-plumed horses. I thought of the vigil I kept over Mother’s lying-in-state, a drawn sword in front of me and my wings spread. How we exhibited the old bat as if she could still feel, in satin on the catafalque strewn with lilac and lavender and rue.
I could not leave Savory there to rot. I was furious with myself, my jaw clenched so hard my head was pounding, my fingers rubbing over the dirty bandage around my palm. I missed. I missed my target. I fouled a shot with a crossbow. I went over and over it in my head, unable to comprehend how that could be. When blood began to seep through my bandage I welcomed it as a punishment and a reality.
She will not be crows’ food up there on that platform. I kicked my way into the enclosure and scaled the ladder. Corpses were arranged lying on their backs all over the timber grid: naked old men and women, some babies, and a dried puddle of a foetus. Some were the maimed fragments of fellow warriors that the Cathee fyrd had managed to ship home from Insect battles. They were in various stages of decomposition and most had lost the small bones of their fingers and toes already through the grid. Some skulls lolled back, disconnected and eye sockets staring at the sky. One was bloated, but most were pecked to no more than skeletons pasted with dark red shreds of sinew and muscle. Green algae grew on the cups of their vertebrae. The ravens had started already on Savory’s hazel eyes. I quickly picked her up and, hugging her to my chest, carried her down the ladder.
I bore her in my arms to the clearing with the marriage stone. Savory, it will make shift for the only monument I can give you here. But you will have a monument, my hunting lady. You don’t belong with those people any more. I raised the spade and speared it into the earth with all my strength. You are not one of them. I turned over the tangled roots and soil.
I dug Savory a grave where we first made love. The cup-and-ring stone was her headstone, and I did cheat the villagers of their foul ritual. I covered her tenderly and then I lay down beside the grave and embraced my arm over the little mound of disturbed earth. I do not know how many days I lay there.
I do not remember leaving her side. I must have walked east through the forest for days to the coast. I must have lived on the game I shot, but whether or not I could still shoot I cannot recall. I was absent all that time. At Vertigo, the town built against the sheer walls of a deep chasm, someone gave me passage on a ship for Awia. I returned to my house at a gallop and ordered the gates locked and chained. I wrote no letters and spent no time on the archery field. I accepted no visitors and ignored the Messenger’s frantic queries. I waited for my hand and a shredded heart to heal.