“We won’t have time in the morning,” Aerling said. “Go and do what you must now.” And then he looked up, and there was something else on his face this time beside mere emptiness. “We have to remember. We all have to remember. So go and do your remembering.”
Porto nodded.
Aerling looked from Porto down to the grinning, fanged skull. “I need to remember, too.” He held up the skull with both hands, tilted it, then lowered it to his lap again and began scraping with his knife at a remaining lump of dried flesh where the neck had joined the head. “I’m going to take it home,” he said. “I’m going to put it by the fireplace,” he said. “That way I’ll remember.”
“I’ll remember the men too, Thane,” Porto said after a moment of silence. “Old Dragi and the rest. They died bravely. You can tell their families that.”
Aerling shook his head. “No. I’m going to take this home so that when I wake up in the night sweating cold and my heart beating too fast, remembering that creature staring down at me, I’ll look at this instead and I’ll remember that it’s dead. Dead.” He nodded, as though he had proved a point, and went back to his scraping.
As Porto walked out of camp and back into the mountain’s long shadow he could not help wondering that everything in the valley now looked so ordinary, so harmless. But for the immense tailing of boulders and broken stones that seemed to have been dumped against the mountain’s base, there was no sign anything had happened here for centuries. The gate was buried, the monsters inside now invisible. The trees dripped with melting snow. Even the sounds of his comrades readying for departure seemed to fade away.
He made his way through the abandoned grove, past trees so tall he thought they must have grown before men came to Osten Ard. It was even more quiet here, like an empty church. He hoped the winter would remain at bay until he had at least made his way out of cold Rimmersgard. Porto had a fierce longing for the true southern sun, for the sound of the ocean and the smell of the harbor. He might have been knighted by the duke of Elvritshalla, but he had never felt so Perdruinese as he did now, surrounded by Northmen and the great cold mountains. He could not imagine that, once home, he would ever leave Ansis Pelippé again. Not to fight, that was certain. Not to see friends and comrades die.
Porto saw from the edge of the clearing that something was wrong with Endri’s grave. As he neared it he made out that it had been torn open and his heart dropped—the stone cairn he had built had clearly not been enough to keep the scavengers away. Then another thought crept into his mind and his innards went icy cold. He stood at the edge of the pit and looked at the way the stones had been pushed outward around the mound and the way the earth itself had fallen in.
He had prayed Endri’s grave had been beyond the Norns’ terrible spells, but the marks in the earth of hands digging upward like the claws of a mole told him otherwise. The hole had been emptied, but not from outside. The chances were good that if he had risen, Endri had been burned with the others.
Porto was turning to go when he glanced to the southern side of the clearing. In a knot of young trees, none of them much more than twice the height of a man, leaned an upright, unmoving man-shape, sagging like a scarecrow in a Nabbanai field.
“Oh, dear God,” Porto moaned softly, and made the sign of the Tree on his breast. “Sweet Usires preserve us.”
As he drew closer to the body he saw that the garments did indeed look like Endri’s, stained with earth and blotched with melted snow. But when he was only a yard or so away he saw what had stopped the dead man here, so far from everyone else, so far from both the living and the other spell-raised dead. Endri’s red Harborside scarf was tangled in low branches and had pulled tight around the corpse’s throat like a hangman’s noose. The young man’s head hung down, hiding his face, but the skin Porto could see was mottled and black.
He reached out toward the body, doing his best to ignore the terrible stench, disgust and pity fighting in his trembling hands. Endri was facing south. He had not been moving toward the Norn summons, or even toward his living fellows, Porto realized, and tears sprang into his eyes as he understood. The dead man had been trying to go home.
Then Endri moved.
Porto jumped back in horror, and when he made the Tree this time it was as though he stabbed at his own breast. The dead fingers twitched and the corpse tried to take a stumbling step, but it was held fast. Porto could not move either, though no scarf held him.
The corpse lifted its head, revealing the full horror of weeks in the ground. Something in the ruined eyes seemed to recognize Porto, because the dead hand rose as though trying to touch him.
“God in His mercy, what did they do to you?” Porto whispered.
He could not stand to look at the corrupted, collapsing face a moment longer. He drew his sword and hacked as hard as he could at the thing’s neck, but was unable to swing his blade cleanly among the encroaching trees. After many more clumsy swipes, the head at last parted from the neck and thumped to the ground. The body slipped from the restraining scarf and tumbled down beside it.
“Now you can go home,” he said as he stood over the corpse, though it was hard for him to speak. “Go in peace.”
Porto carried first the body and then the head back to its grave, fighting down the urge to retch at the ripe smell of death, trying to remember that this was Endri his friend, who deserved better than he had been given. Then he went back for the scarf, untangling it carefully from the branches. At the grave, he placed the head atop the body and then carefully wrapped the scarf around Endri’s neck again, the beloved scarf the boy’s mother had woven, to hide the raw and ragged wounds Porto’s sword had made.
When he had filled in the grave, and had again piled the heavy stones atop it, he kneeled to pray, then said farewell to his friend for the second and last time. When he was done, Porto climbed to his feet and walked slowly back to camp.
Appendices
An Explanation . . .
An Explanation of the Fairy People Known as Sithi,
and their Cousins the Norns,
as well as their sometime Servants, the Ocean Children.
Excerpted from A History of the Erkynlandish People and Their Great Capital, the Hayholt by Tiamak of Erchester, Counselor to the High Throne
Despite appearing to be of two quite separate races, the golden-skinned Sithi and the Norns with their faces and limbs as pale as snow both belong to a single fairy race which was once called the Keida’ya, which in their tongue means “Children of the Witchwood Trees.”
Long before men recorded history, the ancient Keida’ya lived (or so we are told and must believe, for no mortal man was there to see it) in a faraway land called Venyha Do’sae, the Garden that was Lost. And although the reasons for the Keida’ya leaving that place and coming here are mostly unknown to us, stories told to our own High King Seoman when he lived among the Sithi, and to ancient travelers like Caias Sterna of Nabban, help us to know something of those elder days before the immortals came to Osten Ard. The Keida’ya lived in a city on the shore of a great sea, and by their own account lived there for a hundred centuries or more in peace and prosperity. But then something came to break that peace, a foe or plague known only as Unbeing. The Keida’ya fought against it, but the power of this Unbeing was too great, and at last they were forced, with the help of their magical servants the Tinukeda’ya, to build eight great ships and escape the Garden that they had lost to Unbeing.