Book 6, Chapter 8: A Funeral and a Damning
“Ma’am?”
I looked up. Two soldiers. A washbasin on the table, next to the food I was supposed to be eating. Right, they’d been ordered to bring it. I stood, “Thank you, gentlemen.”
“Are you feeling unwell? Should we get Lady Cresida?”
“Perfectly fine. Just, ah, wanted to wash up before eating.”
“This is the first time you’ve answered all day.”
“Yeah.”
He nodded, “Ma’am,” and left. The other looked at me a moment longer, then joined his friend in leaving.
Probably I’m brooding too much for a teenage girl. Alright. I sighed, moved the basin to the other end of the table, getting it away from the food and ale, and started taking what dirt I could off, without the aid of soap. At least in my kingdom we used soap to bathe, though I couldn’t, for the life of me, convince the medical professionals to use it in healthcare.
Soon, my hands appeared clean. My face might be, I didn’t have a mirror. The water in the basin was dirty, though. Indirect evidence of me being cleaner. Or at least less dusty. Knowing this place, and the proximity of the latrine, the lack of functioning sewer systems, there was probably helminth worms in the dirt here. Not really something you wanted too much of in your body. I scrubbed my face and mouth again.
Cold, dry meats, dried bread, cheese. Not bad, honestly. And the afternoon ale was stronger than the morning ale. That was a nice touch. Different ales for different activities of the day. We definitely didn’t have this concept where I came from.
Although that depends on where the ‘I’ part of me came from. I, whose memories belonged to this land, these people, was more or less born here when I opened my eyes a year ago, a teenage girl on a battlefield. Or ‘I,’ the ancient god whose memories I didn’t have, but much of whose working knowledge I did. It was a strange and disjointed feeling, knowing how to, say, make whiskey, but not the why of it, or the memory of learning how to do so.
I didn’t really want them, the memories. But I wondered. What was it like to wake up in Valhalla? Did I have a bed there? Private chambers, a library – a lover? If such a thing truly existed and was not merely my imagination, based on mythologies I knew, but didn’t recall reading. Yet that hypothesis explained nothing about my experiences, so I could ignore it.
Why did I constantly second guess myself?
A woman’s voice broke my reverie, the captain’s wife standing in front of my table, hands on her hips, “The burial ceremony begins soon. And you are as dirty as swine.”
I tipped back the ale, emptying the mug, before answering, “I won’t be joining the ceremony. You go, I’ll wash up.”
“Nonsense. Follow.” She set off.
Close my eyes, shook my head, sighed, stood, then followed her, not looking back at the remaining food left uneaten and feeling a tiny bit tipsy from the adult beverage.
***
“I just washed the dirt off.”
“You’re still dirty. Let’s get those clothes off you for a scrubbing.”
I just stood there frozen. No idea why I was feeling self-conscious, but I was. “Uhm, I can do this myself.”
“No,” she said, roughly unbuttoning and unstrapping my dress, “apparently you can’t. You’re just standing there. You’ve even got dirt under the shift! What possessed you to go digging graves?”
It wasn’t all that cold, being late summer, but I shivered, shoulders inward, then reached for the wet rag in a bucket of cold, clean water she had waiting. “Do you by chance have soap?”
“We have oils.”
“Oils?”
Cresida shook her head, scowling, and yanked the cloth out of my hands, then scrubbed me down, top to bottom, pushing the dirt away. She repeated this process several times, quickly, squeezing out the water as she went, until I was damp and cold. “Here,” she pulled me away from the bucket, then picked up a clay bowl, filled with floral scented oil. The captain’s wife took a new cloth, soaked it in oil, then lathered it all over my body.
“How is this getting me clean?” Why oh why, I thought to myself, do you people not understand how soap works!
After scrubbing the oil into my legs, she stood up, set the cloth down on a plate, picked up a curved wooden piece that resembled a brush without the tines, and said, “Have you never used cleansing oil?”
“It’s not how we bathe where I come from.”
“How truly backward. Stand still.” Not ungently, she ran the blade of the wood down my arms, scraping off the oil into a cloth in her left hand, then repeated the process, switching to a flat blade for my back and other uncurved parts.
My olive skin gleamed in the oil and I felt like a slave about to be auctioned or a bodybuilder about to go on stage. Still, it wasn’t awful. And now I smelled like champagne, with a tinge of rose. “Oil. I would never have imagined. How, ah, do you keep it off the clothes?”
Wiping off the wooden blade, then the other one, Cresida reached over and threw a rough towel at me. “After you’re done, I’ve a dress of mourning for you to wear.”
“I could just watch the tent for you. No need to trouble yourself by including me in the ceremony.”
She scowled in response.
I sighed inwardly, toweled off as much of the remaining oil as possible, leaving shiny skin, full of fragrance, and put on the black dress, thinking that this would otherwise have been the best time to escape.
***
By the time we’d joined the soldiers standing in a line, most of the bodies had been laid into their pit. Soldiers were carrying the remaining mage corpses in pairs, laying them down, crossing their arms on their chest.
The part I liked the most, other than that the mages were dead, was that Cresida had stuck me in a black dress. No red stripes, nor any color but muted black, I could sneak off at night wearing this. I’d try now, but for Cresida standing beside me. Knock her out, tie her up? A smile came to my face. I quickly let it drop, hoping no one saw. On top of all my odd behavior today, smiling at a funeral would cement my insanity to these people. But did it really matter? I wanted nothing more than to escape them. Too many soldiers around for that now.
I realized then I could have taken her with me – kidnapped her! Tied up her arms, forced her away at sword point. But she’d have screamed for help, and I wasn’t about to stab her. Definitely have to use a gag, maybe a beating or two until she shut up.
“Lady Sarah!” whispered Cresida through clenched teeth, “Stop giggling!”
“I’m not giggling.”
“You are, under your breath.” In my peripheral, she was staring at me.
“Chuckling, at best.”
“Both of you, hush now,” said the captain.
It was darkening and there were too many clouds to see the sunset. Fitting, I thought, for these we’d prepared for burial.
Someone in a costume – robes, funny, tall hat, red sash, high leather boots – solemnly entered the space between the soldiers and the mass grave and began chanting and waiving around a brazier. With the humidity and falling temperature, the smoke pouring out of it lay heavy in the air, slowly drifting about his person, little eddies spinning off as he walked.
The sentences he uttered, going on and on, about death and life and uplifting these mages who’d so guarded these people, their lands and lives, were blasphemous to me and the soldiers repeated it, and I hated their words. And when he read out their names, the five hundred and thirty-eight, my wrath grew, overflowed, and poured out.
“No,” I rose my fist, stepping forward, “I curse you.”
Beyond our camp flashed into daylight as lightning struck a tall tree across the meadow, darkness hitting us as its sound tore through the air as if rending space itself, its boom echoing and echoing before the rain slammed into us, a torrent so strong each drop was a slap.
Winds whipping my dress behind me, rain soaking through, I called out as loud as I could, “A thousand years of damnation in the afterlife, you who stole the divinity for your mortal magic! Suffering will be your teacher! Your guide. You will toil and work and never have rest until your debts are fully paid.” My pronouncement made, my fist dropped and for a moment, silence, emptiness, then heavy rain hammering the ground, bouncing back off growing puddles, flashes above the tree line and thunder ringing out.
One of the corpses sat up, staring at me. A woman, then a man, and one by one, all the dead stood, faces turning, eyes on me. The first pointed its crooked, blackened finger, and a hoarse, dissonant voice filled the space between us, “Let us rest.”
“No.”
“Release your curse.”
“I will not.”
“We know who, what, is coming. We will tell you in exchange.”
“I cannot release you from the debt you must pay.”
“We can tell you how to contain them.”
“Go! Leave me and face your dues! You are the dead and the living is forever denied you!”
Someone violently shook my arm – Cresida – yanking me backwards. The rain pelted mud into our dresses, and she yelled something, face twisted in anger, but the storm drowned out her words. The captain gave me a dirty look, pulled me into line by my other arm.
Above the canopy, trees bent toward us, the rain a river pouring into our faces. The priest waved and waved his soaked brazier, no smoke but water rushing off it, mouth moving, chest heaving, though nothing could be heard. And we braced ourselves against the storm as soldiers rushed to shovel mud into the pit of empty bodies.
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