Текст книги "The Last Hour of Gann"

Автор книги: R. Lee Smith

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“Ash,” he said, in a voice like char itself. “Stained. Leaf.”

“Six is for…is for…”

“Thaliszr.”

Recognition came like dawn behind the clouds of this world: dim and colorless, but steadily growing until its light was complete. He stood up, and it was Meoraq who did it, the real Meoraq. He looked around, seeing this place, seeing her at his feet. The yellow stripes stayed high and bright on his throat, but he sheathed his sword and held out his hand.

“Please be okay now,” Amber whispered, and took it.

“I’m burning,” Meoraq said curtly, pulling her to her feet and releasing her at once. “But I see you. I think…I’m here.” He looked back at the baby again, then at Xzem, who had not moved in all this time, and finally at his other sword. It seemed to surprise him to see it lying on the floor. He had to check his belt and see that it wasn’t there before he went over to pick it up again. “Stay close behind me,” he ordered, and headed for the door.

“Wait!”

Meoraq watched her limp across the room with distracted concern, but it wasn’t until she bent down and picked up the baby that he seemed to realize what she was doing.

“No,” he said.

“I have to.” Amber hugged the baby closer and pointed at Xzem. “Tell her she can come with us!”

“I will not.” Meoraq glanced swiftly down both sides of the hall and came back in, reaching out his hand to her. “There is no time for this! The enemy is all around us! Now come!”

Amber bit back her first impulsive words on the subject of how much time he’d had on his hands when the issue at stake was sex. That wasn’t his fault and they sure didn’t have the time to fight about it. She said, “I’m not leaving without this baby.”

“I did not come here to liberate the whole of this camp!”

“Are you sure?”

His hand lowered.

“God doesn’t give you what you want,” said Amber. “You tell me that all the time. God sends you where you need to be.”

“If we try to save them all, we will surely be taken,” he said, not arguing, but only stating a fact. “We must leave them. Come. They will not harm their own.”

Amber stalked over to Xzem and put her hand on her shoulder. After a tense, shivering silence, Xzem sighed and loosened her shielding arms enough to show him Rosek.

Meoraq looked at that for a long time. Then he looked at her. And at the ceiling, not in his exasperated are-you-seeing-this-too way, but in an uncertain frown. He stayed that way for a while, probably praying. “So be it,” he said at the end. He beckoned to Xzem and she rose, her neck bent and silent tears still falling, to follow him.

“Wait,” Amber said. “I think there’s another way out.”

Meoraq glanced in the direction of the stairwell, which was suspiciously quiet, then followed her pointing finger to the ground, where dots of blood marked the path taken by the panicked raider she’d passed on the way in. He took a few steps in that direction, keeping his sword at the ready as he searched the darkness. “Do you know where it leads?”

“To the well-room,” Xzem said softly.

They both looked at her.

“There is a second stair,” she told them, stroking Rosek’s swollen head. “But the door is always locked and only Zhuqa and his most trusted hold the key.”

“I’ll go get it,” said Amber, and turned to flee.

Meoraq caught angrily at her arm, but looked at the baby and released her, unsure.

“I’ll be all right,” Amber promised, not at all certain this was true, but knowing she could get to Zhuqa’s room and back faster than grieving Xzem could be coaxed to follow. “Stay with her! I’ll be right back!”

His spines flattened. He took the baby and shifted it to one arm, gripping his kzung tightly. “Run, then.”

She tried, galloping through a haze of pain much faster than her hip wanted to hold her, and conscious of every second as it slipped by. There were two bodies on the landing, two more sprawled over the stairs, but no one was waiting there to cut her into pieces. They all knew better than to fight in the cramped, dark shaft, she supposed. And just the fact that it was this dark meant that they’d shut the access door. It couldn’t be blocked from the outside, so if they’d shut it, it was to keep Meoraq blind to how many men were waiting for him on the other side.

‘It could be worse,’ thought Amber, forcing herself down the stairs as noisily, in her own mind at least, as a rhinoceros. ‘They could be getting ready to drop a bomb down the shaft.’

She ran faster.

Zhuqa’s door was yawning open just as she’d left it. She bulled through and limped around him to the heap of his clothes, and thank God he’d actually undressed for his little game tonight, because he’d never done that before and she’d been so badly beaten up between one thing and another that she honestly didn’t think she could have rolled him over to get the keys. Amber got them, looked around, and then—what the hell—limped over to get her shift because it was bound to be cold and rainy outside and there was no point escaping from raiders just to freeze—

Amber froze.

She thought, ‘I didn’t see that.’

She thought, ‘No, I did see that and I just think I didn’t.’

She thought, ‘Please, let me have seen that.’

She turned around.

On the floor between her and the table, Zhuqa lay naked in a thick, black clot of blood with his eyes open and a few splinters of what were probably his teeth strewn loosely in front of his mouth.

The floor directly next to the table was empty.

Well, not entirely empty. She could see the hilt of Zhuqa’s knife lying where she’d dropped it. And she could see, a little ways away from it, the broken blade that she sure thought she’d left buried in Iziz’s head.

It wasn’t even all that bloody. Just a little smear at the very tip. There wasn’t anything at all on the flat end, where she reasoned he would have had to grab it to pull it out, if…if she’d really hit him.

“I hit him,” she whispered, staring wildly all around her at the stubbornly empty room. “I know I hit him.”

And she had hit him. She’d hit him so hard, her hand had gone numb. So hard, the blade had broken. So hard—

–she’d knocked him out.

Oh God.

She’d only stabbed him through the scales. She’d hit the bone of his skull and broke the knife. She hadn’t killed him. She might not have even hurt him all that much.

Iziz was still alive.

‘Well, by all means stand around,’ Bo Peep invited. ‘You can apologize when he comes back.’

She shuddered once, hugely, as if physically shaking free of the hold that empty patch of tiled floor had on her. The first step was still hard. After that, she turned and bolted down the hall like her hip had never been hurt at all. It had been and it let her know it, but by God it didn’t slow her down.

She tore up the stairs, her bare feet banging out echoes they must surely be able to hear wherever they were waiting to ambush them. Meoraq ran to meet her, hugging the baby under his arm like a football, so that her first words on reaching him weren’t anything to do with Iziz at all but a shrill, “Oh for Christ’s sake, lizardman, what’s wrong with you?!” She gave him the keys, took the baby, and smacked him in the side of the head, all in the same half-panicked movement.

His arm swung hard enough to make the air howl, but he caught the blow before it hit her. They both stared at his fist, cocked and shaking in the air—he, with glazed eyes and yellow flashes at his throat; she, in open-mouthed astonishment. He recovered first. Without a word, he turned around and ran the other way.

Xzem was waiting at the end of the long hall, next to the fresh body of a raider. It might have been the same one she’d passed earlier; she couldn’t tell when he was lying face-down like that and didn’t want to look. Meoraq worked the keys and tucked it into his belt immediately, freeing his hand for his samr. The stairwell on the other side of the door was dark and silent, catching every sound and throwing it back in echoes. Meoraq listened, then closed the door to hiss, “If it goes badly, run and I will find you. If I don’t find you…go on to Xi’Matezh. God will send you on.”

Knowing there wasn’t time for words of comfort, even if she could have thought of something to say, Amber reached out and touched his arm.

And felt him stiffen. Shudder. And pull out of her grip. He started up the stairs without looking at her.

Suddenly, Amber’s hip hurt more. She let Xzem go ahead of her, watching Meoraq climb around the corner and out of sight without ever once glancing her way. The baby snuffled against her chest and reached out its tiny hand to pinch at her. She hugged it closer, dragging herself up one stair at a time, thinking, ‘That shouldn’t be much of a shock either, little girl.’

And the worst of it was, it really wasn’t.

The stairwell was capped, like the other stair, with an access door that opened into a covered building. This one had the look of a stable, long and not too narrow, with stall-like partitions indicated by wooden poles and plenty of harnesses and lengths of chain hanging on the walls.

It was a stable, built for raiders’ cattle, the two-legged kind. The only other door was at the far wall, where Hruuzk was yoking slaves together in a double line. He didn’t bother to look around when he grunted, “This is all there were in the pens. I didn’t stop to hunt up the rest of them. Where do you want me?”

Meoraq attacked. He did it without asking for prayers, without any warning at all. His boots struck three times against the planks before he leapt, and by then Hruuzk had already shoved the team of slaves away and was turning to meet him.

They crashed together, four swords and two bodies in a terrible riot of screaming women and spraying blood. Amber thrust the baby into Xzem’s listless embrace and darted forward, snatching up the first thing she saw that even looked like a weapon: a short length of chain attached to a heavy collar. She didn’t try to swing it—couldn’t have, not without hitting Meoraq, a slave, or Xzem and the babies—but she jumped on Hruuzk’s mammoth back the very instant he offered it to her and bashed him on the head as hard as she could. If she could knock Iziz out with a knife-tip, she reasoned, she could surely take Hruuzk out with an iron ring, or whatever the metal was.

Hruuzk did stagger. He also reached back and plucked her off him, swinging her on a short, violent arc over his shoulder to strike up against his chest with his sword suddenly at her throat. “Drop it or she dies!” he bellowed.

Meoraq lunged without expression, stabbing his samr under Amber’s arm and into the slave-master’s heart. She felt and heard the splintering of bone when Meoraq twisted and then wrenched the blade free. He knotted a fist in her shift and yanked her to him as the slave-master collapsed. She could feel the hot gush of his heart’s blood on her back, not quite shocking enough to distract her from the equally hot tickle of blood on her front, streaming from the little nick on her throat where Hruuzk’s sword had cut her.

She stared at him.

“Quiet that…Quiet the child.” He let go of her and moved on to the outer door, pulling Zhuqa’s keys from his belt.

The baby was screaming, tiny fists balled and hammering at the scaled arm that held it. Xzem gave it up wordlessly and stroked at Rosek’s swollen snout. She was still crying. Amber was dangerously close to joining her.

Meoraq cracked the door open and looked tensely out, threw the captive women an assessing stare, and finally gestured to Amber. She joined him at the door, not so numb that she failed to notice the perfectly chilling glance he sent at the baby now purring resentfully against her breast. But he moved aside, careful not to touch her, and let her look.

She didn’t try to count them. The distance and the dark would have made that difficult even if there weren’t so many or if they were holding still instead of prowling impatiently around the building where they thought Meoraq had to emerge. She could hear shouting, but couldn’t make out the words. Moving torches throughout the ruins told her they were making a search of the other structures, and sooner or later, they’d come here.

“For the moment, they still believe they are attacked by a band of men,” Meoraq told her, grimly watching the torches. “And they have not yet fully rallied. Once they do, or once they learn it is only one warrior who stands against them, it is done. Be silent, all of you!” Meoraq snapped, and the white-noise whimpering of the captives dialed itself down into sniffles. To Amber, brusquely, he said, “We will go out, that way, around the wall. When it is at our back, we run. Be aware, the wind will cover only so much sound.”

“It’ll be quiet now,” said Amber, holding the baby securely against her body.

He grunted, checked outside, and looked back at the women. “We will go as far as we can as fast as we are able, but it is three days running to Praxas.”

She didn’t think she had much of a run left in her, but didn’t dare to say so.

He grunted and moved away to unlock the women. Amber stayed at the door and watched the torches track slowly back and forth across the camp, listening to chains clink behind her as Meoraq gave everyone their orders. Amber’s hip ached. She shifted her weight onto her other leg and listened to the baby purr until Meoraq rejoined her at the door, brushing her aside to peer out. His body was hard as marble. He didn’t say anything to her. He waited, coiled and ready, then pushed the door open and moved out, sword in hand. The women followed, as tight in their formation as if they were still yoked together. Then Xzem, her head down and tears shimmering over her scales. Last of all, Amber, straining to limp at any kind of speed and praying the baby wouldn’t protest this treatment as long as it was her doing the jostling. By the time she got around the side of the stable, the only one she could see at all was Xzem, and only for a few more seconds.

She ran anyway, blind in the night, following the smudge of moonlight behind the churning clouds, even though it showed her nothing but the ghost of her own body. When Meoraq at last came lunging out of this impenetrable black, it was only her breathless exhaustion that kept her from screaming surprise.

He caught her arm as she staggered, and let her go again as soon as she had her feet solidly under her. He looked at the baby and his flat spines quivered against his skull.

“I’m not leaving it!” she hissed. “So don’t you even ask me!”

“You can barely carry yourself, woman!”

“Then leave me!” Tears of horror sparked, as if she somehow hadn’t known she was going to say it even with the words in her own mouth. She shook her head, her arms tightening around the baby until it squeaked in annoyance. “Leave us both!”

Meoraq looked at her for a long time.

And then he turned around.

As Amber pulled in the shaky breath that would have become her first wail of despair, he dropped to one knee and made a gesture like throwing something over his shoulder. He did not speak. His back was very stiff and straight.

“Are you…praying?” she ventured.

“No!” he snapped back, and made the gesture again. “Hold on to me. Hurry!”

She couldn’t wrap her legs around his hips without a moan, and that moan became a wrenching cry when he seized her thighs and hupped her up higher. She dug one arm around his neck, kept the other tight around the baby, now riding squeezed between them and not very happy about it, and Meoraq began to run.

Even burdened as he was with her weight, he caught up to the others in just a few minutes and soon was running at their head again. Amber bumped along in agony on his back, clenching her jaws to mute the screams she could not stop herself from making, and just waited for it to end.

12

He could not run them all night, although he tried. Their pace slowed and slowed and finally, he was forced to cast it all in Sheul’s hands and set them down in a camp. He allowed them no fire. They had no food. He gave Amber the swallows that were left in his waterskin and she annoyed him immediately by passing it off to the slave-mother, who drank it all without thanks and resumed her silent vigil over her dying child.

The wind gave way to rain. The women huddled together to defend against it as best they could, miserable and making little secret of it. Amber sat apart from the rest of them and held the infant close to her heart. Meoraq knew she was watching him, but he could not make himself go and sit beside her yet. He made endless patrols in the dark, waiting for an enemy that never showed itself, and caught himself several times rubbing restlessly at his loin-plate. He had burned longer and deeper this night than he had ever even imagined, but the flames were still close. He wanted to find raiders in pursuit of them, wanted to give that blessed heat possession of his hands and heart and mind. Failing that, he wanted to lie with his woman, but not in front of an audience of six witnessing slaves.

And their children.

The baby bothered him. Not the slave-mother’s yearling, which was already dead in every way save that of its clay, but the other baby. The one that Amber refused to leave behind even at the risk of her own life. He did not know precisely what she would say to him if he told her that the creature she was cuddling only looked like a baby with a soul, but was in truth no more than Gann’s clay given the seeming of life by the abominable sin of its conception…no, he didn’t know what she would say to that, but he was reasonably certain it would come in shouts and perhaps with her fist bouncing off his hide.

Meoraq grunted to himself, glancing back into the darkness where he knew his wife to be, even if he could not see her. Sheul’s urges again flared, but he walked on and gradually the fires became coals. Once he was rid of the slaves, he would show Sheul a proper thanks for the return of his Amber, but for now, the enemy was surely close.

And the enemy’s clay-born spawn, even closer.

It looked like a baby. It sounded like one. Its tiny fingers gripped at Amber’s soft breast like the fingers of any true baby he had seen. Not that his interest in watching such things had ever been strong, he had to admit that, which meant that if there were some subtle clue proving the child’s innate sin, he could only assume he’d missed it.

The child’s sin needed no proving. All his life, the priests had made it clear that if the corruption of Gann was in either parent, the corruption was in the child. What was bred into the clay could not be smoothed out, even by the Father’s hands. This was truth.

And it was truth that the thing that looked like a baby had surely been sired by one of the raiders—men who freely indulged the urges of the clay until Sheul Himself closed His eyes to them. Men who poisoned their minds and bodies with strong drink and phesok. Men who carried bladed weapons and who used them to do wrongful murder upon other men. Men who made trade of female flesh for their sexual pleasure, and of male flesh also, if no females could be procured. The women who lay in union with such men had either been born to them, sired of their sin, or had been exiled from their cities for sins of their own. Either way, they were also lost to Sheul and therefore it followed that all children born to them—all, regardless of what innocent mask the offspring might don—belonged to Gann.

The sun was rising. Through the rain, he could see faint threads of grey in the east, a reminder of the pilgrimage he was supposed to be taking. How could he go there now, with Gann’s corrupted own in his keeping?

“Sheul, my Father, You have been with me and led me well to this moment,” Meoraq said, searching the skies through eye-stinging rain. “I pray You guide me now. What am I supposed to do? Where am I meant to be?”

“Meoraq?”

Amber’s voice, low and hesitant upon the wind. Truly, the sun was rising, because it only took a few moments of searching before he could make out the pale shape of her a short distance away. She could not see him as well, it seemed; she was not quite facing him and did not stop squinting into the black until he was nearly close enough to lay his hand on her.

She startled, but didn’t cry out. She knew the enemy might be close as well. Which meant she wouldn’t have risked calling out his name without a reason.

“What is it?” he asked.

“I…Can you come back to camp? Xzem’s baby is…I need you to talk to her.”

He could have nothing comforting to say to the mother of a clay-born child, but grief was raw in Amber’s voice and the other infant was there in her arms. With an uneasy glance heavenward, too aware of Sheul’s watching eye, Meoraq went back to camp with his woman silent at his side.

Gann’s child was dead. Its mother knelt, still holding it, still gazing into its empty face. Amber had called the slave a name, but in a human mouth, the sound could be anything. Meoraq paced unnecessarily around the other women, deeply uncomfortable with what he was about to do, but finally went to stand before and speak directly to a slave.

“How are you called?” he asked tersely.

Amber stared at him, her soft mouth opening a little.

“Xzem, sir.” The slave looked up at him, heaved a tearful sigh, and raised the dead clay in her hands for him to take.

Meoraq did not want to touch it, but Amber was watching, so he did.

It felt like a real baby, too.

“Can we…” Amber came a small step forward, interrupting his uneasy inspection of the thing. The infant-shaped creature she held yawned and scratched contentedly at its snout, too sleepy to open its eyes. The slave-woman at his feet shifted her eyes from her dead child to the living one and then looked down at her empty arms. “Is there any way at all to have a fire?”

“A fire?” Meoraq echoed, alarmed. “You mean…for a funeral?”

The slave looked up.

“Please,” said Amber softly.

He reached out and took her sleeve, meaning to pull her aside and explain that if Gann’s children received any funeral at all, it was to be returned to the clay that had spawned them, but as soon as he actually touched her and felt her warmth beneath his hand, all reason left him. His loin-plate restrained him, but if it weren’t for that, he would be extruded, he knew. He would be on her and she beneath him…and whether Gann’s or Sheul’s, he had a dead child in his arms.

In that moment of sickened confusion, a hand touched at his boot. Meoraq looked down, first at the body in his hands and then at the slave who had mothered it.

She did not ask. She shivered on her knees, her eyes like open wounds, and did not dare to ask.

The weight of the lifeless clay dragged at him, far heavier than it had been. ‘It only looks like a baby,’ he reminded himself and, as if in answer, suddenly found himself thinking that Amber looked nothing like a woman and yet he had believed that at once.

The children born of Gann’s corruption were soulless. They were abominations of living flesh. They were sins incarnate and Sheul did not see them. They were clay.

They were clay…and this one’s mother had carried it all through the night knowing it could only die in her arms.

“I…need to pray,” said Meoraq. He turned away and realized only after he had done so that he still held the child’s clay in his arms. He could not think of a good way to turn around and pass it back, so he carried it with him into the trees and set it before him where he ultimately knelt.

He was not quick to speak Sheul’s name or to invite His eye. Meoraq knew the word of Sheul and it was absolute. The child before him, however pitiable in its seeming, was a child born of Gann. To give it a funeral as if it were a true dumaq—

He would have given Amber one once, he recalled, again without conscious deliberation. When she lay in her stupor and her treacherous people could not be troubled to care for her, he had been ready to give her a gentle end and see her to Sheul’s halls. She had not been his woman then. She hadn’t even been dead. And if he would be honest, he would have to admit that when he thought of her fellow humans at all, he thought of them as animals. They might walk as dumaqs. They might have speech and wit and reason. They might have in every way the look of people, but they were no more than animals, and a venomous, brutal breed at that.

Yet Amber had a soul and her soul was hammered at Sheul’s forge just the same as Meoraq’s own. Her clay was Meoraq’s clay, shaped upon Sheul’s wheel. Her light was the light of any dumaq, shining from Sheul’s lamp. And where it was true of her, surely it must be—

Meoraq put a hand to his brows and rubbed the rest of that thought away before it could come to some sacrilegious ending. Sheul’s word was absolute. The children born of Gann’s corruption had no soul to find welcome in Sheul’s halls. A funeral would be blasphemous.

It looked like a baby.

Its looks were a lie.

The blood that stained its thin scales looked like the blood of any dumaq.

Its blood was the blood of Gann.

Its mother grieved for it.

The grief was a lie. Its mother was as soulless as her spawn and had no true heart.

Then why did she carry it so far?

Meoraq hissed as the futile circle closed itself around the same arguments. He didn’t know why he was tormenting himself like this in the first place. A funeral fire was out of the question. The raiders were surely in pursuit. He could give an honest answer to his wife that they could not risk such a thing being seen. He would offer to bury it, since he knew that what distressed Amber the most was the thought of abandoning it to be scavenged by beasts, and even that was surely more than its mother expected.

It occurred to him—not all at once, but slowly, like the light of dawn even now revealing the empty world to him—that there was nothing in the Word that expressly forbade funeral fires for Gann’s children. Priests had, yes, but not the Prophet.

It was an uneasy thought, but now his eye was moving over the newly-illuminated plains, seeing the thick copse close on his sunward side where a fire could be better hidden as well as fueled. The wind would thin the smoke and perhaps even carry it away from the raiders so that it could not be seen at all. It would mean holding to this camp all day, but he’d been considering that already, hadn’t he?

Meoraq tried to shake the thought away, but it stayed, growing until he could see just how the fire would be laid. So now it was not a thought at all, but a plan. And perhaps a sin.

He reached out to tap the back of one finger against the misshapen head. It felt like skin, soft as only a yearling’s could be, sticky where its blood had dried and been wetted again by the rain. There was no avoiding it.

“Sheul, O my Father,” he said heavily. “See me now, I pray. Before me, there is one of Gann’s getting and I mean to give it Your final rites. I know it is a terrible thing I do and I must answer for it when I stand before You, but it is too much like a true child, Father, and that is surely how my woman sees it. I will not ask Your blessing, only Your forgiveness, and if there be a sin in what I am about to do, let it all be mine, great Sheul, because my woman knows no better, but I do.” He gathered up the limp body and held it. “And I mean to do it anyway.”

Sheul had no answer for him, which only seemed fitting as he’d asked no questions, but the rains slackened. By the time he’d returned to his camp with the child, it had stopped entirely. Amber watched him come from where she knelt on the ground with her arms around the slave-mother, comforting her. Xzem stared at the ground, her hands clutching at one another and every muscle tensed.

“There will be a fire,” Meoraq said, fully aware that those five words might well have damned him. “We will go to that thicket and there remain until—”

That touch on his boot again. Meoraq felt his spines twitch, but did not allow them to flatten. He looked down, ready to be as patient and sensitive as a man could be while ordering a slave to stop grabbing at him, and found her with both hands on either side of him, palms to heaven. The touch he felt was the top of her head as she pressed it to his mud-caked boot and silently wept.

“Thank you,” Amber said, hugging the other infant even closer. Her shift, overlarge, slipped down at the subtle movement to expose her bare shoulder and the mark of his teeth. Thoughts entirely inappropriate to this moment briefly clouded even the unpleasant sensation of the slave sobbing on his foot. His spines did flatten then, and there was nothing he could do about it. He turned his face away.

Xzem raised her head as Amber stepped back. “Her name was Nali,” she said tremulously. “But I never told her so. Will she…know it? When you pray for her, sir? Must you call her Rosek even then?”

The order to stop touching him burned hot in his throat, and his belly, but it did not touch his voice. “Sheul knows His children.”

The frantic light in her eyes did not dim. “But will He know mine?”

There were no magical answers to that and he could see his troubled silence crippling her with every passing moment, until finally, and for no reason at all, he looked at Amber.

Seeing her, the will of Sheul became vast beyond the imagining of any man. To say that it could be captured in anything so finite as written words suddenly seemed fantastically arrogant. Even the Prophet’s own great work must pale beside His will.

“We were all lost to Gann once,” he said. The words did not come easily, but they felt like truth. “What is lost can be found.”

She searched his eyes, her own bleeding despair and hope so long damaged she didn’t even seem to know it was there. “Swear it, sir,” she whispered finally. “Please, swear it and it is true.”

“No man speaks for Sheul,” said Meoraq. “But I will observe that the child lived through a long night to die here, where it…where Nali was not a slave.”

Xzem stared at him, trying to believe him as the tears spilled endlessly from her eyes, but he had no more comfort to give her and Amber was too close, so he turned away and walked fast into the cooling wind.

At the heart of the thicket where he took the baby was a clearing, abutted by a fallen tree, long dead and well-seasoned and protected enough by the living to be mostly dry. He built the pyre and lay her down. He still didn’t know what she was or how much sin adhered to him for the speaking of these rites, but when the hour came to make the prayers, he made them. And he made certain to call her by her name.