If, indeed, she needed telling. .
The people of my family were loving, that was certain. Whether or not they would live to regret having accepted Zarina so open-heartedly remained to be seen.
Edild rolled up a blanket and tucked it under her arm. I paused to bend over my brother and kiss his forehead — at first he barely seemed to notice, but then he met my eyes and gave a quick nod, presumably acquiescing to my suggestion — and then I hurried after the others.
We did not speak as we crossed the marshy ground to the fen edge. Too soon the upright posts set in the water to mark the crossing place to the island came into view. I tried to suppress my dread. The back of his head isn’t there any more, my brother had said. What awful sight were we going to have to see? I shuddered, all the way from my shoulders to my feet.
Silently, Sibert took my hand. I could have kissed him.
Hrype went first on to the planks between the uprights. He moved slowly, looking over the side to the right and the left, searching the black water for what we knew was there. Very soon he gave a soft exclamation, pointing down to the left. ‘There he is.’
We hurried to join him.
Derman was floating just below the surface, face down, his sturdy, powerful arms outstretched as if he were trying to fly. The coarse fabric of his patched and darned shirt was full of air, rising like a huge bubble up to the surface. His legs bobbed gently up and down in a horrible parody of walking.
Realizing that I was looking at every part of him save the crucial area, I turned my eyes to his head.
The back of his skull had received a series of blows. Whoever had attacked him had hit him so hard that the bone had smashed. We could see the leathery white matter beneath, and that, too, had ruptured, revealing a mass of bloody pulp in which there were fragments of the skull.
All hopes of a terrible accident flew away. Had it happened as I had so hoped, had he slipped, cracked his head on the planks of the causeway and fallen, unconscious, into the water to drown, there would have been only the one blow to the head. This had been no innocent, fatal misfortune.
What poor Derman’s murderer had done to him was one of the most furious, frenzied onslaughts it has ever been my bad luck to witness.
It took all four of us to pull him up out of the water. It was as if the fen did not want to let him go and, when finally we wrestled his dead weight up on to the planks, the black mud gave out a last bubble of stinking gas as if to spite us. We were filthy, our hands, arms, bodies coated with muck, and Sibert was soaking wet, for at one point, frustrated at our lack of progress, he had armed himself with a stout stick, jumped down into the water and tried to lever the corpse up from beneath.
Edild spread out the blanket, and we laid Derman on it. We each took firm hold of a corner and, with a huge effort, lifted him off the ground. Then we set out across the mile or so of difficult terrain back to my aunt’s house.
Edild and I live on the edge of Aelf Fen, well away from the rest of the village. We prefer it that way, and so, I am sure, do the villagers. Healers are very welcome when people need us, and indeed our patients and their relatives are always grateful and fulsome in their praise and their gifts when we make someone well again. However, in most people’s minds healing is next door to witchcraft, and they are all more than happy that we don’t live right on top of them.
As we approached the path up to the house, we could see that Edild’s patients for the day had already begun to arrive. Fortunately, there were only two so far: an old man, and an even older woman. Edild gave a small sigh and indicated that we should lower our burden.
‘William and his old mother,’ she said quietly. ‘She is dying, and William will miss her very much when she goes. There is very little I can do, but he appears comforted by the tonics I prescribe for her.’ She frowned, then turned to me. ‘Lassair, go on and speak to them. Tell them to go home, and say to William that I’ll come to see his mother later.’
I ran on up the path and delivered the message. William looked at me worriedly and whispered, ‘Mother may not last till later,’ to which I could think of no answer except to agree with him. His mother looked as insubstantial as a piece of dandelion fluff, and I was amazed she’d managed to walk up from the village. I could not, of course, say so. I watched as they shuffled away and, when they could no longer see the house, went back down the path to summon the others.
We carried Derman’s body into the house, laid him very gratefully on the ground — he was extremely heavy — and Edild secured the door. There was no sign of Haward, and I hoped he was even now at home in the stoutly reassuring company of our parents. Working very swiftly, Edild removed Derman’s garments and studied the body. We all knew how he had died, and I turned away as she and Hrype studied the devastating wounds on the back of his head. Sibert, I noticed, had retreated to the furthest corner and was busy inspecting his hands.
He, however, was not an apprentice healer; I was. All too soon my aunt’s autocratic tones sang out: ‘Come here, Lassair, for it is rare that we have the chance to see what is inside the skull.’
With the utmost reluctance I did as I was told. Stepping forward, I made myself look at the great crater on the right side of the back of the head. To begin with, I had to fight the urge to be sick, for the bloody, oozing, waterlogged mess was a hideous sight. But then, listening to Hrype and Edild speculating on the brain as the source of all we do, all we are and all we think, revulsion turned to interest, and then to fascination.
‘Is his brain different from ours?’ I asked after a while.
Hrype turned to me, his eyes alert. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because he was simple,’ I replied. ‘He may have grown into a man, but he didn’t act like one. Everyone said he was like a child, but that’s not really right either. He was just. .’ I searched for the right word, gave up and said, ‘Just different.’
Hrype nodded. ‘It is an enigma, isn’t it?’ he agreed. I was not sure what an enigma was, but I said yes anyway. ‘Here we have the brain of a man who was different, as Lassair says — ’ he paused to prod at the white matter — ‘yet, for all that is visible to our eyes, it looks just like any other.’ I wondered how many brains Hrype had studied, but quickly decided I did not wish to think about that. ‘What happened, Derman?’ Hrype asked softly. ‘Were you born this way, and if so, why did the gods choose to make you as you were?’
Nobody answered him. I’m not sure any of us knew how.
Edild was inspecting the rest of the body. I moved closer to her, watching as she ran her hands over the stiffening limbs. I found myself looking at the genitals, blushed furiously and then sternly reprimanded myself for my coyness. Healers, as my aunt repeatedly tells me, treat every part of the human body with the same dispassionate interest, even the bits normally kept modestly out of sight. I stared at the penis and testicles beneath the fine downy body hair, noting their lack of development. Derman was a man, yet his genitalia were like those of a small boy.
I suddenly remembered something Zarina had said: He is not as other men, and he does not begin to comprehend the true nature of how a man and wife live in intimacy together. And, later, The idea of any sort of physical closeness is just not possible.
Staring down at Derman’s body, I wondered how she had known. At the widow Berta’s cottage, Derman had slept in the lean-to, but then these two had grown up together and travelled with the troupe of players for a considerable time; it was only to be expected that Zarina would have observed her brother’s naked body on occasions. All the same, there was something about this that bothered me. .
I did not have the chance to think it through because just at that moment Edild, who had been inspecting the large, flat feet and was now running her hands up the lower legs, gave a soft exclamation. ‘Look,’ she murmured.