ICE BURIAL: The Oldest Human Murder Mystery (The Mother People Series Book 3) (47 page)

Larak
watched her and worried. She did not
fret
overmuch about finding answers
to the mystery of Lief’s death
,
as others did;
that would come in time
.
All she worried about was
Zena
, who was suffering so intensely.

“You must at least go to your Kyrie again,” she urged gently one day, hoping that to speak once more with the Goddess would help
Zena
.

To her surprise,
Zena
agreed and began to go to her Kyrie almost every day. Larak finally realized she went mostly because the Kyrie offered an excellent place from which to spot Lief, should the ice ever melt. Still, for
Zena
to go there was a start,
she
told herself hopefully. Surely, the Mother would find a way to reach her. And She did, though not in the way Larak had expected. It was not the voice of the Mother that finally pushed
Zena
to begin, finally, to recover. Instead, it was an urgent message from Runor,
asking
Zena
to come at once.

**********************

When
Gurd
next came to his senses he was lying on an unfamiliar pallet.
The walls of a hut rose around him,
not his own hut
but
one
he did not know
.
Terror filled
him
, the terror of a
trapped
animal
.
He
must
not be seen, must
escape.
He clawed at the coverings around him, tried to rise, but his legs would not
hold him
.
It was as if his feet were not there.

A woman came
into the hut
and made noises at him that he could not decipher.
Gurd
cowered against the pallet,
struggled to
crawl away
, but h
is hands felt useless too, and there was no strength in his body. He could not make it
obey. How could he escape if he could not move?

The woman
s
hook her head
as she watched his effort
.
“
You are hurt,
”
she said softly
.
“
You must stay still. We will help you.
”

Gurd’s
heart thumped wildly with fear. Where was his knife? He must find it, use it to get away.
But he had no knife. He had lost it on the mountain.

Kneeling beside him, t
he
woman adjusted some
bandages
on his
head
. Her face
horrified him. He had never seen a face so close before. It swam out of focus as he stared at it, repelled but fascinated. He had looked into the eyes of animals but never
a person
, except for that one time with the girl he had found
.

Another face appeared
above him
and his body
seemed to freeze.
It was
hers -
the face of
the
old
woman
he wanted so badly to
kill.
Gurd shrank back. Helplessness assaulted him. He could not kill her when he could not move, could not even get away from her.
Perhaps she knew he meant to kill her, so she would kill him first.
He was powerless before her.

Cowering against the pallet, he stared at her, unable to look away. His
terror
was
so great, his sensation of helplessness so intense that he could not breathe.

Sensing his panic,
Runor moved away to
regard him from a distance. She had
never
seen anyone so paralyzed with fear,
only
a cornered animal
.
And perhaps that was what he was, she thought, with an unexpected spurt of pity.
She wondered who he was and how he had come here. His
head
was so swathed in bandages that it was impossible to tell.

The woman who was caring for him removed the bandages on
one
side of his face
to rub in a soothing balm.
Runor felt the hut whirl around her. She took a step back, then another, then her legs gave out and she sank to the
floor of the hut, overcome by faintness and
nause
a.
She knew now who he was… She had
hoped never to
see him
or think of him
again
, never to think
of what she had done to him in that moment of
overwhelming
rage…
She had not even let the images of that
appalling
day come back to her mind…
never had she allowed them…

Against her will she looked again, saw the hideous scars that disfigured the man’s face. The sight released the floodgates of memory, and the images
poured
into her, as
unstoppable
as the
ice
that had
careened down the mountainside onto
her village.
She saw herself
pulling Mordor against her
all those years ago
, felt her body fill with desire so intense she could hardly breathe
.
He was so young then,
hardly
more than a boy
,
tall and beautiful.
Never had she desired a man as she had desired him. A
n
d how could she have known
what he would become
?

But she
had
known,
Runor thought bitterly,
and felt shame pour into her, hot and ugly. Even then she had
known that she should not trust him, known that beneath the beauty, the persuasive words,
there was evil in his heart - the evil she had tried to kill when the flood had come. She had just blinded herself to
it so she could
satisfy her craving
for him.

And
all the time, Gurd had been watching
them
. That, she had not known, but Mordor had. Ju
st after
he
had left her that last time,
Gurd
had
run out of the trees and
pounced on her
, raped her
.
Mordor had
told him he could
;
she
had known
that as inexorably as she knew the sun would rise, and d
isgust had given her strength. It was of little use.
Gurd
was heavy and thick, his arms and legs as strong as
a
bear
’s
, and she could not dislodge him.

When he had rolled away she had leaped to her feet, enraged, and flung the container of food that had been heating on the fire into his face. Then, noise had come from him, a throttled cry of pain like that of a mute animal caught in the jaws of a predator. The sound had never left her.

Korg had taken
Mordor
and the
bear-like man
away that day.
She had n
ot
seen them again
for
many years
, and when they returned, Mordor had become
the Leader. There had been no recognition on his face
when he saw her
,
as if his mind had erased
all
memory
of their time together
. He did not know who Rofina was either. Korg knew though
. Korg knew everything, even about
the rape and the
hot liquid
she
had hurled
into Gurd’s face.
He never spoke of them directly, but she had understood.
If she did not cease to act
as wise woman for the tribe, did not stop speaking of the Goddess, he would tell Gurd to do to
Rofina’s
face what she had done to Gurd’s…

Covering her eyes with her hands so she could not see him again, Runor stumbled from the hut. She sat for a long time trying to
calm her pounding heart, trying
even
harder
to
understand what
Gurd’s
presence
in her village
meant, why
he
had had not died with Korg and the Leader.
Probably, she thought,
he had lived
because
he
was not in the village,
as Korg and the Leader had been
, but in the woods, in the hut he had
built for
them.
The waters would not have got there so fast.

She had felt him there all
through the
years,
had
felt his eyes on her as he peered at her from the trees
. The intensity of his hatred for her had seemed to scorch her body as she had scorched his face. He
had never come
close to her, though, never come
into the village.

Gurd never came into any village
,
Niva had told her.
He did
not like people to see him.
Runor flinched from the thought, but she was not surprised, considering what
the burning liquid had done to his face. What s
he
had done to his face.
A
n image of Rofina’s face with similar damage came into her mind
.
She
closed her eyes tightly to shut it out.

“Great Mother, what have You done?” she cried out
, almost weeping now
. “Why has he come here, to me, to my village?”

An
unexpected
answer
surfaced
, and
Runor’s
shoulders slumped.
Was it possible that this was
another task
the
G
oddess
had laid upon her
in exchange for life, to make amends to this man as well as to Her?

If that was the case, it
w
as not going to
be easy
, Runor thought with a return of her usual spirit.
To feel
the compassion she
knew she should
feel
t
o please the
Mother
was difficult indeed.
Gurd
had caused her great pain, not just by raping her but by causing her to relinquish the role that had been entrusted to her by the
Goddess
and to allow
Korg and the Leader to impose their beliefs on her
village.
As a result, she and her people had lived all those years in fear.

Runor
sighed
, recognizing that
there was justice in the Mother’s demand. S
he
had caused
Gurd
pain too
, and not just from the burns.
It could not
have been
easy to live with a face like that.
I
f the Mother required her to make amends to
him too
before she died
,
she would
do her best
. She had
not
been kept alive
just for her pleasure in watching Mara
’s
little ones grow,
she reminded herself,
but to settle her debts.

“
Great Goddess
,
You
do not make
the last years of my life easy,
”
she said aloud,
“
but I suppose
that
is the price I
must
pay for my sins.
”

Her
complacency
did
not last.
As
the days passed and she found out more about
Gurd
,
the price became higher, then higher still
until it was higher than Runor could ever have imagined
, higher than she thought she could bear.

First
Wulf,
the young man from Niva’s village
,
came
to
tell her that Durak and Pila had been found
living in
the hut that had been fixed for Rofina
near the lake
.
That was welcome news, but hearing that Durak had been shot by an arrow was not.