Swiftly, she tugged off her boots and unpinned her cloak. As they fell away, she rose. A breath of aether picked her up bodily, and the guardian faded until she saw it only as a spire of ice sparkling by the gateway.
The way lay open.
She did not look back as she stepped over the threshold.
PART TWO
QUEENS’ GRAVE
V
IN THE AFTERLIFE
1
PROBABLY he was dead.
But when the fish twisted and slipped out of his hands to escape back into the river, it acted like a living fish. The men who laughed uproariously around him sounded lively enough, and the stocky man who had yesterday threatened him with an ax had certainly looked alarmingly alive.
He knew what death felt like. Just yesterday he had held a newborn infant in his hands that was blue with death, but he’d learned the trick from Aunt Bel that sometimes newly reborn souls needed chafing to startle them into remembering life. Just yesternight he’d stumbled through a battlefield with his own life leaking from him in flowering streams of blood.
It was hard to believe that he was alive now, even standing up to his hips in the cold river as the tug of the current tried to drag him downstream. It was easier to believe that he was dead, even if the fish in the baskets up on the shore churned and slithered, bright sunlight flashing on their scales. His companion, Urtan, clapped him on the shoulder and spoke words, none of which meant anything but which sounded cheerful enough. Maybe death wouldn’t prove onerous as long as God granted him such good company.
The other men, Tosti and Kel, had started splashing each other as soon as the last weir had been hauled into the shallows and emptied of its bounty. Now Kel stoppered up the weir with a plug of sodden wood and flung it back into the river, and they swam a little, laughing and talking and with gestures making him welcome to join them.
He let the current jostle him off his feet as he lay back into its pull. Didn’t death claim its victims in exactly this manner? Perhaps he was only streaming upward on the River of Heaven, making his way toward the Chamber of Light through a series of way stations. But as the water closed over his face, he heard the hounds barking. Just as he heaved himself over and stood, Sorrow bounded out into the river, paddling madly, while Rage yipped anxiously from the shore.
“Nay, nay, friend,” he said, hauling Sorrow by his forelegs back to the shallows, “I’ll bide here in this place for a while yet, if God so will it.” His companions swam closer, unsure of his intent. They smiled cautiously as he shook out his wet hair, then laughed when Sorrow let fly a spray of mist as the hound shook himself off.
The village lay just beyond the river. Towering behind sod-and-timber houses rose the huge tumulus with its freshly raised earthworks and the gaunt circle of giant stones at the flat summit. In many ways, the tumulus reminded him of the battlefield where he had fallen, but the river had run on a different course there, and the forest hadn’t grown as thickly to the north and west, and the tumulus itself had been so very ancient. Nor had there been a village lying in its shadow. This couldn’t be the same place where he had died.
“But it’s a good place,” he assured Sorrow, who regarded him reprovingly. Rage padded over for a pat and a scratch. “Yet doesn’t it seem strange to you that there should be no iron in the afterlife? They carry daggers of flint, and their ploughs are nothing but the stout fork of a tree shaped so that one length of it can turn the soil. It seems strange to me that God would punish common folk by making their day-to-day work harder in the other world.”
So Aunt Bel would have said. But of course, she wasn’t his aunt any longer; he had no family, orphaned child of a dead whore.
“Alain.” Urtan gestured toward the baskets, which needed two men each to hoist.
Perhaps he had no family, but in this land they needed him, even if only for as humble a task as carrying a basket of fish up to the village. Hadn’t he given everything else to the centaur woman? Maybe at this way station of the journey toward the Chamber of Light, he had to learn to forget the life he had once lived.
They hauled the baskets up the slope. Children shrieked and exclaimed over the fish, and after much good-natured jesting he realized that it wasn’t so hard after all to learn a few words: “fish,” “basket,” “knife,” and a word that meant “child,” applied equally to boys and girls.
It was a good idea to learn as much as he could, since he didn’t know how long he would bide here, or where he would end up next.
By the gates he saw Adica. Without the gold antlers and spiral waistband that had made her presence awe-inspiring up among the stones, she looked like any young woman, except for the lurid burn scar on her cheek. She watched them as they hauled the baskets through the gate, and he smiled, unaccountably pleased to see her, but the spark of pleasure reminded him of last night, when she had gestured toward the bed in her house. Her movement as she smiled in response made her corded skirt sway, revealing the length of her bare thighs.
He flushed and looked away. He had made vows to Tallia, hadn’t he? If he must abjure them, if he must admit that he and Tallia were no longer husband and wife, then hadn’t he long before that been promised to the church? He ought not to be admiring any woman.
Yet as they came to the big house that stood at the center of the village, he glanced back toward the gates, lying below them. Adica still stood there beside the elderly headwoman, called Orla. Hadn’t he given up all the vows and the promises, the lies and the secrets? Hadn’t the centaur woman taken his old life and left him as naked as a newborn child in a new world?
Perhaps, like the infant yesterday, he needed to learn how to breathe again. Perhaps that was the secret of the journey, that each way station taught you a new lesson before you were swept again downstream toward the obliterating light of God.
At the big house, children of varying ages swarmed up and, by some pattern he couldn’t quite discern, Urtan doled out the fish until a small portion was left for Tosti and Kel.
“Come, come,” said Kel, who had evidently been stung at birth by the bee of impatience. He and Tosti were close in age, very alike except in temperament. They led Alain through the village to the only other big house. It had a stone foundation, wood pillars and beams, a thatched roof, and pungent stables attached at one end, now empty except for the lingering aroma of cattle. Inside, Kel showed him a variety of furs and sleeping mats woven of reeds rolled up on wooden platforms ranged under the sloping walls. The young man showed him a place, mimed sleeping, and made Alain repeat five times the word which perhaps meant “sleep” or else “bed.” Satisfied, he led Alain outside. Setting the guts aside for the stew pot, they lay the cleaned fish out to dry on a platform plaited out of willow branches. It took Alain a few tries to get the hang of using a flint knife, but he persevered, and Tosti, at least, was patient enough to leave him alone to get the hang of it.
o;Nay, nay, friend,” he said, hauling Sorrow by his forelegs back to the shallows, “I’ll bide here in this place for a while yet, if God so will it.” His companions swam closer, unsure of his intent. They smiled cautiously as he shook out his wet hair, then laughed when Sorrow let fly a spray of mist as the hound shook himself off.
The village lay just beyond the river. Towering behind sod-and-timber houses rose the huge tumulus with its freshly raised earthworks and the gaunt circle of giant stones at the flat summit. In many ways, the tumulus reminded him of the battlefield where he had fallen, but the river had run on a different course there, and the forest hadn’t grown as thickly to the north and west, and the tumulus itself had been so very ancient. Nor had there been a village lying in its shadow. This couldn’t be the same place where he had died.