Serpents and Stairways

Chapter III - Part 3

"It's not like we know a lot of faces around here."

"That is true. But what if a funeral hearse passes by?"

A bystander could simply nod, but Dinah decided not to argue. First, because it was useless—if her servant got something stuck in his cunning head, there was no unstucking it, and second...

Second, the argument did seem convincing even if, as of late, hearses had become more modest. The funeral processions used to flaunt around the town in circles before heading to the cemetery—a vacant vulgarity, as her father put it. He despised the rotting old-light from the bottom of his soul. They had an awful fight then; though not their first. The quarrel only stopped when Dinah remarked with cold causticity that if her parents didn't want her to soak up the idiosyncrasies, they should've invited her at least for holidays—and she was right. It wasn't news that the Kingdoms of the Old Light, and Albion especially, held death in reverence. Even her mother, who wasn't born in the Kingdoms but to the East—in the Northern Empire—was subject to this influence.

The way it showed was subtle but significant. In mother's stories, the little trinkets that young Dinah was allowed to play with were artifacts of mourning: empty perfume bottles were tear-catching lacrimaria, outdated brooches—parting gifts from her departed confidants.

They were walking and walking, as if swimming through the city. Sun still hadn't appeared, the world around was stuffed with the cotton of fog.

"What are you pondering, my lady?"

Funerals seemed to young Dinah like a solemn counterpart to birthdays, when people cried instead of laughing—a birthday turned inside-out. To the other side of the veil, if the body hadn't yet been carried away, the family of the deceased would, with grave majesty, close the curtains, cover the mirrors, and flip the photographs. To this side, the bodies were surrounded with salt and watched for three days in turns—just in case. And everyone everywhere stopped their clocks. And all life stopped with them.

No, of course she felt sorry for everyone who didn't mourn for money (and not just the professional mourners—dad explained to her early the ins-and-outs of inheritance law). She pitied her grief-stricken friends and her peers within funeral lilies. She cried about them, hiding under a blanket, biting on her nails, and again and again thinking how unfair it was that gods lend people life only to take it back, like some sort of school bullies. Several times doctors had to prescribe her the (miraculous) popular within the pedagogic circles potion "Mrs. Winslow's Calming Mixture", brewed to help young children fall asleep faster; and their parents and tutors—return to their adult matters sooner. The mixture contained morphine, and so there were cases when children never woke up—but the effectiveness couldn't be denied.

But even on the sorrowful nights which preceded the "calming mixture", in spasms of sobbing, with blood around the nails, and in melancholy too deep for a little girl, Dinah couldn't help but think about deceased girls' hair, dressed with wonderful spray roses; about the way they looked so much like Snowwhite.

"What? What am I pondering?"

But the reign of death had yet another facet, one that revealed itself even before the caskets shut—those who were left behind. Children.

Orphans were the norm. Dinah could imagine the terrible things that happened to the unfortunate souls from poor families, who had lost one or both of their parents—her ivory tower wasn't that Babylonic. Within her own social circles the torments were more delicate. Kids were handed over from relatives to relatives, eventually to very distant ones, if after parents' death they were left with elderly grandmothers and grandfathers.

And that too was, more or less, the norm. Saying "my parents died, so I live with my aunt" would be met with condolences, but wouldn't earn the new acquaintance any special treatment.