OoOoO
Trosk was chaos. Never before had Lhara ever seen so much macabre. In the square, tongues of flame continued to lick at the foundations of The Giant's Shoe, hissing vilely wherever water was thrown on them. All that remained of the inn was a charred black skeleton. The buildings on either side had been badly scorched too, and even now women were climbing out onto the mossy roofs to stamp out any threatening embers.
Beyond town, the mountainside was a grim canvas of bloodied earth. That was where Lhara had spent the past hour, laboring alongside Quella and the others to drag the wounded onto the back of a ram-drawn cart. It was horrible work. After the deathly white Factionist whom Lhara had first found, they added seven more to the cart. All but two were people Lhara had known her entire life.
The Fourth Company had been thorough; any of their wounded had been carried away on horseback with their fellow soldiers. Only the army's dead remained. The Factionists likewise had done their best not to leave anyone behind during their escape. It seemed they had even taken some villagers with them; nobody could find Halna, Alred the shepherd or Bjorn the carpenter. Two Factionists were all that remained alive that Lhara could find. The pale man remained unconscious, not even flinching anymore, a change which worried Lhara. The other Factionist, a weathered clansman with a serious wound to the belly was far more responsive. His agonized groans could clearly be heard even at twenty paces across the smoky battlefield.
By far the worst parts of Lhara's task were the dead. Seeing her da's broken body bourn down out of The Teeth all those years ago had been hard, but Thrymm's death had been quick and clean. She still remembered the slight O of surprise frozen upon her da's blue-grey lips. This was different. These men had died violently, gruesomely, in pain. Never in all her years would Lhara forget finding Gerdiom cradling Cassel's bloodied head in his arms. It seemed that, in their final moments, the giant-hearted father of three had crawled to Borse's son and held him.
By the time Lhara and the other 'scavengers' got the wounded to Magda's cottage, there were already nearly half a dozen people inside. Uncle Torl was set up on the kitchen table, with Aunt Rhena, Eima and Alina all trying to hold him down while Magda set his broken leg. A slick red gleam of bone caught Lhara's eye past Rhena's shoulder, and her already twisting stomach lurched.
"Lhara!"
Magda's shout, shockingly loud and forceful for a small, stooped old woman commanded Lhara's instant attention. The Wise Woman, unable to spare a hand, jerked her head toward the bedroom door.
"Set the two worst on the bed, and make the others as comfortable as you can. Then I need you to crush yarrow root...your uncle is bleeding too much."
Hearing Torl growling and groaning his pain as he bit down on a wooden ladle was almost as bad as seeing his leg. Some of the villagers were able to help support their own weight a little as Lhara and Quella tried to carry them in off the cart. Others including the one Factionist were complete deadweight.
Leaving Quella to tie tourniquets and hold cloths to bleeding wounds, Lhara rushed around Magda's little kitchen pulling down bundles of herbs and a mortar and pestle. She only had half a handful of roots ground when Magda called for her again.
"My hands cannot sew," she said. One look at the old woman's gnarled, arthritic fingers more than proved that. Magda held out the needle and thread with bloodied fingers to Lhara. "Stitch as you would through leather, and finish with a square knot."
With no time nor option for squeamishness, Lhara took the needle with trembling hands. It took three tries for her to thread it, all the while keenly aware of her aunt and cousin's anxious eyes on her. Bending over her uncle's leg, Lhara began.
Once she started stitching, suddenly the world seemed to narrow down to that one task. Magda was right; it was like trying to sew leather. Inch by inch Lhara tied Uncle Torl's flesh back together over the newly set bones of his leg. Halfway through, she realized that Torl was no longer groaning. Magda reassured them though that he had merely passed out.
There was no time to pause once Torl's leg was closed. A sprinkling of powered yarrow to prevent more bleeding, a paste of garlic to ward off infection, and it was on to the next victim of The Battle of Trosk. The clansman with the open stomach wound proved to be in even more serious condition than Lhara had first thought.
"If he coughs up blood..." Magda murmured softly to Lhara under her breath as they worked to sew him back together too. They had no way of knowing just how deeply the sword had gone, or what damage it had done. Thankfully the clansman was far too busy screaming his lungs out for him to hear Magda's words.
It was one bloodied, broken man after another, each being set upon the creaking kitchen table and tended as best they could be. Magda led the way where she could, and directed Lhara where she could not. By the time they came to the white-faced Factionist, Quella had already stripped him on his black head wrap, shirt and vest in the search for other injuries. The blow to the head seemed to be his only ailment, but it was also troubling. As Magda brushed aside his blood-stained white hair to clean the gash, the man did not stir.
The Wise Woman shook her head, strands of similarly snowy hair escaping to stick to her sweaty, wrinkled brows. "There may be bleeding inside his skull. If so, the pressure of it will destroy his mind, and likely kill him."
"Is there nothing we can do?" asked Lhara. She was running out of clean rags to offer Magda.
"There is one thing..." Magda seemed hesitate to elaborate. "It is dangerous, and almost as liable to kill him as the blow he already took. I've only seen it done once before." She frowned. "We must wait. If come the morning he still has not woken, then we may need to make a way for the pressure to escape...with one of Owen's drills."
A picture of what Magda was alluding to appeared in Lhara's mind, and she shuddered. She could scarcely imagine how such a thing might actually do any good. Ironically enough, even as she worried on his behalf, the pale Factionist wore an expression of absolute repose. Lhara imagined that he must not be able to hear them, if his mind was even still able to hear and understand.
The sun was already beginning to hang heavy in the sky outside by the time the last of the wounded were tended. Magda's little cottage was completely overtaken by cobbled together sickbeds. Blankets, pillows and rolls of Argali wool were brought in to make the men as comfortable as they could be. Only when the sunlight turned the dull gold of mid-afternoon did Lhara at last let her thoughts catch up to her enough to think on the inn.
Wiping her hands on the bloodied apron tied over her leggings, Lhara stepped outside. The normally sweet mountain air smelled of smoke and iron. A few people lingered in the square, listlessly carrying half-filled buckets of water from the well to dump on stubborn embers.
Quella slowly approached Lhara, her daughter at last returned to her rightful place on her mother's hip. The child gummed her fingers, looking at Lhara with enormous, unconcerned eyes.
"Devina had Marden and Yelaina taken to the barn, along with the others," she said softly.
"Has anyone...prepared them yet?"
"No. They'll wait for you, Rhena and Eima."
"What about Yelaina?"
Quella's eyes went glassy, and she blinked rapidly. "Your family would have been hers before the autumn winds. I'm sure her da would agree, if he were here."
Even just the thought of walking into the barn and seeing what was left of her eldest brother and dearest friend made Lhara want to run up the road into The Teeth and never stop running. Tarun had asked her to see Marden buried properly though, for both of them. 'That's what family does'. That's what Marden had told Tarun just that morning, a hundred thousand years ago when the world was right.
"I'll do it," Lhara said. "Aunt Rhena and Eima have Uncle Torl to tend to. I have no one else."
OoOoO
The dead were laid in the stalls of the barn, white sackcloth beneath and draped across them. Marden and Yelaina were in the last stall. When Quella led her to the gate, she hesitated. Lhara understood; little Issa was not yet past her first ten-year, and still too vulnerable to death to be brought into its presence.
"It's alright, Quella," Lhara said. Her own voice sounded hollow in her ears.
Quella nodded, her hold on Issa tightening protectively. "Eima is on her way. She knows what to bring."
Of course Eima would know. She and Lhara had both been only girls when Myra died. The two cousins had cried the whole time as they helped Rhena prepare their aunt and mother for burial. The three of them had combed Myra's hair and dressed her in her finest gown of red silk; a gift Thrymm brought his bride all the way from Anset. Now they would do the same for Marden and Yelaina.
The straw crunched cleanly underfoot as Lhara knelt next to the two covered figures. Even in death, their ripe, full man-ness and woman-ness was obvious, from the hollow between Yelaina's chest and chin to the broadness of Marden's shoulders. Lhara was so afraid to draw back the cloth and spoil the beauty of their forms with the reality of their deaths in the fire. Her hands shaking, she reached out and did it anyway.
They were not as ghastly as Lhara had feared. Yelaina's long, golden hair was singed, but not entirely burnt. Fire and smoke had nipped at their fingers, mouths, noses and feet, as well as their clothes. They were ragged, grey-skinned and mottled with bruises, but Marden and Yelaina were also whole, which was more than Lhara dared hope for.
For a long time Lhara did not move. A foolish corner of her heart pretended that, if she sat and stared at them long enough, perhaps Marden or Yelaina would move. She willed them to rise up and live again, to reject the unfairness of their deaths. Staring at Marden's long, dark eyelashes, Lhara convinced herself over and over that she had seen them twitch against his cheek. Marden really was the image of their da, especially now that he was dead.
Eima found Lhara like that, still kneeling in the straw staring at Marden and Yelaina's bodies. In one hand she carried a bowl of water with fresh rags soaking in it, in the other a wrapped bundle.
"Ma...cannot come," Eima said thickly past the knot in her throat as she gazed upon the still form of her eldest cousin. "I left Ristan with her while she tends Da."
Lhara understood why the living needed her aunt more than the dead, but still the melancholy skies of her inner world grew darker. Her numb fingers clenched the straw beneath her even tighter.
"It's alright," she repeated the same, useless words that she had said to Quella earlier without really meaning them.
"I'm here, Lhara." Dropping to her knees in the stall beside Lhara, Eima set aside the bowl and bundle. Her eyes swam too-bright and spilled over, dripping onto the straw to mingle with a splash from the bowl. "We come from the same ...always have, and always will."
That did it. The mention of the family web, hanging over the door of their cottage on the mountainside finally brought Lhara to tears. Once Marden was sealed within the crypts in The Teeth, all that would remain of him was the lock of his curly hair within the , interwoven with the strands from Thrymm and Myra.
With a sob, Lhara fell against Eima's shoulder. The two girls-turned-women held each other, crying out their loss and regret as they had not done in a very long time. The stifled sounds of mourning rose from elsewhere in the barn too as other families of Trosk grieved their dead together. Despite the tears and love of their kin, the fallen slept on.
They washed and dressed Marden and Yelaina in their best. Lhara brushed Yelaina's hair until it shone once again, carefully trimming off the burnt ends and braiding it up into a golden crown around her head. They dressed her in the robin's-egg blue dress which Yelaina herself had made to be married in, belting it with a woven silver silk girdle that had belonged to her ma. As they worked, Yelaina's lifeless beauty kept tears flowing down Lhara's face without stop.
For Marden, Eima had run all the way up to the cottage to retrieve his things. Peeling him out of his ruined tunic revealed his back and shoulders to be a charred mass of blackened burns, and they had to stop for a minute to mourn again before they could continue. Together they managed to wash away the soot stains from his face and neck though, and outfit him in a fine shirt of dyed red linen, trimmed with embroidered knot-work along the collar and cuffs.
"I brought this..." Eima set down the razor she had been using to groom Marden's bruised cheeks and reached for the half-tied bundle on the straw between them. "I wasn't sure if you wanted him to be buried with it."
The bronze family torc gleamed dully up at Lhara by the light of the lantern hung nearby. Soon it would be sunset. The two rams heads, ready to butt their horns together, hung between Eima's hands. The torc had been Myra's, her da's, and the property of the eldest in the family for as long as their family was known. Marden would have handed it down to his own eldest, one day. Perhaps now it might be Tarun's, but somehow Lhara felt that Tarun would not want it. Not like this.
Lhara nodded. Carefully Eima leaned forward and slid the torc around Marden's neck. Arrayed with the rams at his throat, his knife or seax on his belt and his short beard groomed, Marden looked like the fallen hero of a folktale. He and Yelaina lay side-by-side, hands folded beneath their breasts in all their glory. Lhara couldn't imagine them parted. It was her one comfort that neither her brother nor her friend were left bereft without the other.
A soft knock came at the gate to the stall. It was Magda, looking as if she had aged ten years in the past ten hours. The Wise Woman wore her ceremonial black robe and carried her petrified staff. When she gazed upon Lhara and Eima and the resplendent couple, her grey eyes seemed to grow even more sorrowful.
"What remains of Trosk is gathered. Shall I call the others in to carry them outside?"
"Yes." Lhara stood, pouring out the bloodied water of the bowl onto the straw. "They're ready."
OoOoO
The procession from Trosk up to the crypts of the mountainfolk was a long, arduous one. Never before had so many dead had to be bourn up into the heights of The Teeth at once. Without the men to carry the biers, the going was even harder. All told, nineteen were making their last ascent up the mountainside. Each bier took four strong women to carry; one for each corner ready to take up the slack should another miss her footing on the narrow, rocky path. Lhara felt Marden's weight on the wooden handle she gripped, and clung to it like a woman dangling over a cliff.
The crypts were a long ways up, set into the side of a near-sheer grey cliff. The entrance was marked by a pair of stony figures on either side; both blocky in build and near featureless. It was impossible to tell if they were man, woman, or even human. The statues emerged, half-engraved into the rock, standing guard over the dead of Trosk.
By the time they arrived at the crypts, the sun had set, and the elders had to light the way with torches. One by one they all passed the guardians and into the crypts.
Defying their small, narrow walkway and single entrance, the crypts of Trosk were vast. The long cave stretched back so far into the heart of the mountain that no one had ever dared to walk its length. There, deepest inside the mountain, the first mountain folks' bones lay, dark and moldering on their granite shelves. Every year on the longest night, the elders would lead the men of Trosk to the crypts to carve new ledges into the cave's walls. They chose that night above all to enter the crypts because that was when the spirits of the dead were closest to the living world, and most likely to appreciate the presence of their descendants.
When Orwell, the High Elder lifted his torch aloft, the walls of the cave caught the firelight and came to life. Here, in the arms of The Teeth, the dead slept in starlight. Tiny crystals sparkled from every nook and crevice, twinkling red, green, blue and violet in the darkness. Trosk could have been rich indeed if they were to mine the crypts for their jewels. The mountainfolk knew that some treasures are more worthy of reverence than reaping though, and so they guarded their jeweled heart from the world with a veil of death.
One by one, nineteen biers were laid along the middle of the cave, stretching away from the entrance into the glimmering darkness. Husbands would be laid to rest on half-empty shelves, awaiting their wives to join them in time. Some of Trosk's widows looked so grief-stricken that they seemed half willing to lie down beside their husbands tonight and remain. Some of the older legends even suggested that such a thing was not entirely unheard of.
Aunt Rhena seemed watchful for just such a thing. She had left Torl half-asleep on sedative herbs, Ristan fully asleep in a cradle beside him. She took Lhara's elbow, drawing her close under one arm with Eima under the other. For a moment Lhara felt a sense of déjà vu. How many times would fate keep bringing her back to the crypts?
Magda and Orwell stood cast in torchlight and shadows at the furthest end of the line of biers. The darkness of the cave at their backs was so velvety black, so pure that it seemed to seep into the edges of their silhouettes and blur their edges. Together the Wise Woman and High Elder began the rites for the dead.
It was a song that Lhara had not heard in a long time; The Sleeping Song. Orwell's voice, usually so thin and quivery, took on an ethereal sort of vibration when the crypts caught and echoed it. Magda meanwhile sang in a deep alto, not unlike the Croning Song. The Sleeping Song sounded like wind through the mountains and the whistling of sky lights in midwinter. It also sounded like the endless abyss found in the deepest of dreams, from which no memories can be recalled. Here, in the heart of The Teeth, everything and everyone would eventually be forgotten too.
When the song ended, no one spoke or moved until the last echo had died away into silence. Then Orwell moved toward the first body laid out at his feet. Bending slowly, stiffly to one knee, he reached into a pouch on his belt and marked Gerdiom's cold lips down to his chin with a line of dark blue woad dye.
"Where there has been laughter, there is now silence. Where there has been sun, there is now starlight. Where there has been the breath of life, there is now the kiss of death," Orwell spoke the ritual words softly, but the crypts made them loud enough for all to hear. "From the stone we came, and to the stone we all return. Go gladly into the dark, Gerdiom Gutrenson."
One by one, Orwell went down the line, sending the dead men of Trosk off to their final rest. As the High Elder finished each blessing, their bier was lifted up from the cavern floor and slid onto a waiting shelf. Alina and Taena wept bitterly over Gerdiom, laying wildflowers and heirlooms to rest on his chest. Cassel was set upon a shelf above his ma, her quiet bones seeming to whisper in welcome for one of her twins. A space remained next to her, awaiting Borse's eventual rest. That was, if he ever made it back to Trosk. By now the Fourth Company was long gone.
When they came to Yelaina, it was Magda who approached and knelt at her side. Leaning heavily upon her staff, Magda stroked Yelaina's stone-grey cheek with the backs of her gnarled fingers before tracing the line of woad down her mouth.
"Where there has been laughter, there is now silence. Where there has been sun, there is now starlight. Where there has been the breath of life, there is now the kiss of death. From the stone we came, and to the stone we all return. Go gladly into the dark, Yelaina Thoradaughter."
There was a place waiting for Yelaina not far from Thora, Cassel's late and much-loved wife. The women moved to lift Yelaina's bier, and Lhara's heart broke at the thought of her and Marden forever separated by stone.
"Wait!" She cried out.
Everyone paused and looked at Lhara, their teary gazes reflecting the torchlight even brighter than the crystals set in the walls all around them.
"Yes, apprentice?" Magda asked gently. "There is something you wish to say?"
"I...I wish for Marden and Yelaina to be laid to rest together, upon the same shelf."
It was not a small thing to request, but it was also the most right thing Lhara could imagine. By tradition, only husbands and wives were placed together, their bones to rest forever side-by-side. To set Marden and Yelaina upon the same ledge would be to marry them in death.
No one protested. Instead, many if not all nodded and murmured their agreement. The Wise Woman dipped her chin in assent, and the women bore Yelaina instead to an empty shelf beside where all that remained of Mira and Thrymm lay entwined together. They arranged her there carefully, leaving room for Marden to rest at her side.
Orwell pronounced the blessing over Marden, but Lhara hardly heard the words. When the time came, she joined the women in lifting her brother up next to his bride. Lhara wondered if her ma and da knew that she was there, or that Marden had come to join them forever. High summer was not far past, so she imagined perhaps not, at least to the first. The time for spirits was in the winter, with the long nights and cold stars. Even so, she paused to lean over her parents, pressing a kiss to their near-clean skulls.
"Marden's coming," she whispered to Thrymm and Mira's bones in the dark. Her throat tightened, and her next words were a struggle. "He's such a good man, you'll be so proud of him. I know I am." Then she added "I will find Tarun and bring him home, I promise."
When all nineteen had received the blessings of the High Elder and Wise Woman, and been set upon their stony beds, the women of Trosk turned to leave. Some had to be pulled away from their fallen, and the grief of many echoed inside the crypts. Lhara for her part had spent enough time in the crypts as a girl not to need more. The desire to see her parent's faces one more time over and over again was what had drawn her to The Teeth in the first place, and repeated climbs to the crypts had eventually turned into wider wanderings.
Eima and Rhena tried to convince Lhara to stay the night with them, but Lhara had no desire to see her uncle's pain or her aunt and cousin's grief anymore today. All she wanted tonight was to be alone. So, despite protests, Lhara turned away from the others and walked the path across the mountainside to her family's little cottage below the pastures.
The curious calls of the sheep greeted her from afar in the dark. Moving like a wooden marionette, she refilled the water trough from the well and checked the paddock gates. Everything was as Marden had left it that morning, right down to his crook leaning against the shed door. For a time Lhara stood and stared at that simple wooden stick, the only sound the quiet bleating of the sheep and the singing of the crickets.
Inside the cottage was no better than out. The hung over the threshold, its colorful threads and ties black in the night. Her brothers' belongings were everywhere, from Tarun's precious books to the shears Marden had been trying to repair. The silence was deafening. Lhara stood in the middle of the main room, feeling like a stranger in her own home.
The only thing she knew then was that she could not stay there tonight. Turning away from the dark, empty hearth, Lhara bolted for the door and kept on running. The grass and stones flew beneath her boots even as she ran straight uphill. The lights of Trosk grew smaller and smaller beneath Lhara, and yet the stars remained out of reach. Even when Lhara reached the path that led to the Ridgeline, a narrow and dangerous track that ran along the crest of The Teeth as far south as the eye could see, she did not stop. Gasping and drenched with sweat, she set her feet toward the towering peak of Hollowtop Mountain in the distance and kept on walking.
The village of Trosk was silent beneath a heavy blanket of sorrow that night, but nowhere was quieter than the empty cottage of Thrymm and Mira. One son lay cold beside his love within a cavern of stone and starlight. Another son stumbled wearily behind a column of army horses, being led to an uncertain and dangerous future. Somewhere deep within the spine of the world, the only daughter wandered strange paths that no one but the moon and the night sky knew.
OoOoO