Lord of the Isles (44 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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S
heep grazed among the burial jars on the hillside. They were of the short-legged flat-country breed with white fleece, but they made Garric feel homesick regardless.
“
O
Shepherd, kindly to your children,” the underpriest said. He was a young man but already balding; the afternoon sun had raised beads of sweat on his high forehead. “Do not let this your son Benlo be put to death in the Underworld.”
Benlo's body lay in the outdoor chapel. Over him was a rented pall of crimson silk with gold borders; his face, arranged by the chapel's cosmeticians into an expression of stern grandeur, was bare to the open sky. During the brief time Garric knew him, the drover's visage had generally been hidden behind a mask of false good humor; if Benlo's life had gone other ways, the image on the bier might really have been his.
“Do not let the bright jewels of Benlo's eyes be covered with the dust of the Underworld,” the priest intoned. His robe of bleached wool was too hot for this weather. The garment was a relic of ancient times: the formal wear of the Old Kingdom. Memories of King Carus judging legal disputes whispered through Garric's mind; court officials wore colored garments, but the mass of litigants, attorneys, and jurors gleamed in white wool.
The funeral chapel on the hilltop overlooking Carcosa was a low rectangular building with workrooms and storage inside. There was an entrance in one wall and a different deity's statue in a niche outside each of the others. Services were in the open air: each statue was fronted by a stone bier and pavement. Garric supposed the chapel could accommodate three funerals at once, but he doubted that was normal practice.
Liane cried softly. Perhaps this noble-looking corpse was the father she remembered from her childhood, the man who sang to his wife and daughter.
“Do not let the marble of Benlo's teeth be burned in the lime-maker's kiln,” the priest said. He seemed a decent sort of man. The condolences he'd offered Liane before the service had sounded sincere, not just the mouthing of a bureaucrat looking ahead to the largest fee he'd collect in this next week or longer. For all that, he'd run through this service too often for the words to be much more than words.
Tenoctris stood with Garric and Liane as the only mourners. The old woman watched things that Garric didn't see,
couldn't see. Her hands were clasped and her face would have been grim if it had any expression at all.
Garric wondered which deity presided over most funerals here in Carcosa. In the borough no one doubted that the Lady was queen of heaven, but her consort the Shepherd was closer to people's normal lives. Folks were more likely to spill a drop of milk or crumble a bit of bread to Duzi or before a little carving against the back wall of their hut anyway. The Great Gods ruled heaven from temples elsewhere, but a peasant lived with sheep dung and the pain of childbirth.
“Do not let the lustrous wood of Benlo's flesh be broken for kindling,” said the priest, mopping his brow unconsciously with a fold of his robe. Garric wondered what they did when it rained.
Four local laborers waited to transport the body. They were solid, middle-aged men; obviously bored but maintaining the polite silence that was part of their stock-in-trade.
Would Benlo have had more mourners if he'd died on Sandrakkan? Probably not: whatever the man had done involved his utter ruin and disgrace. It took a better person than the one Liane described her father having become to retain his friends after a disaster so complete.
“Loving Shepherd, do not let your son Benlo be put to death in the Underworld!”
Nobody in Barca's Hamlet prayed to the Sister. Her name was simply a curse and a rare one at that: people had the ingrained suspicion that to name a thing was to call it to you. Here, the third face of the funeral chapel held a statue of the Sister in all her majesty as Queen of the Underworld: snake-headed scepter, skirt of thighbones, and necklace of human skulls.
The Sister's bier and pavement looked as well-worn as those serving the Shepherd and the Lady. Garric supposed it made sense to ask the blessing of the mistress of the dead at a funeral, but the notion still made him uncomfortable. Death wasn't evil: you culled your herd for the winter and Nature culled her herd, mankind included, for the same reason. But
nonetheless there was something perverse about praying to death.
“Benlo bor-Benliman,” the priest said, stumbling slightly over the family name. He wouldn't have officiated over many nobles out of all the hundreds of funerals he'd conducted. “Accept the water of life, that you may spring forth from the Underworld.”
It was a hot day; the aromatics with which the chapel's staff had embalmed Benlo masked but did not fully conceal the odor of decay. The process normally involved the surgical removal of the dead man's organs so that his body cavity could be packed with spices.
Strasedon had simplified the task of Benlo's embalmers.
The priest dipped a golden aspergillum into the bowl of water on a stand beside the bier and flicked a few droplets on the face of the corpse. Replacing the aspergillum, the priest took a pinch of barley meal from golden salver beside the bowl. “Benlo bor-Benliman, accept the bread of life that you may rise refreshed from the Underworld.”
The gold dishes came with the pall of silk brocade for funerals of the highest quality. Middle-class folk were memorialized with silver and a linen covering; the priests used pottery bowls and dealt with the poor in groups; if there was a pall, the deceased's family had provided it themselves.
If the deceased was wealthy, his or her household was expected to wail and follow the coffin. A chorus of six professional mourners came with the price of a first-class funeral; additional mourners could be hired as well. Liane had refused even the six, to the considerable surprise of the chapel's priest.
The priest dusted the barley meal over Benlo's face. The pads of his thumb and forefinger were sweaty: much of the white powder clung to them till he rubbed them surreptitiously on the sleeve of his robe. It was only symbolic anyway.
The priest drew the pall over Benlo's face and bowed three times to the image of the Shepherd: a slender youth standing
with his staff slanted over his right shoulder. Turning to Liane, the priest said, “Mistress, the service is complete. Shall I … ?”
“Please do,” the girl said curtly. She wiped her eyes with a handkerchief, then folded it neatly and returned it to her left sleeve.
The priest nodded to the laborers, who came forward with practiced smoothness; each man went to his allotted corner of the bier without fumbling for position. They lifted the frame supporting the corpse and walked with it into the chapel.
The bier remained. Its sides were decorated with tree-of-life carvings. Garric thought of the similarly decorated coffins in the ancient graveyard near the Red Ox. Families buried their dead simply in the borough. returning to the soil the bodies of those who'd worked it in life.
Garric didn't know which way was right. Maybe what mattered was that people followed their own traditions, whatever those traditions were. Deep in Garric's mind, King Carus chuckled in agreement.
“Ah.” said the priest to Liane. “I'll go with them and oversee matters, if I may?”
“Of course,” Liane said. She was completely under control now. She wore the blue garment in which she'd arrived at Barca's Hamlet. Her only concession to the occasion was to wear a bonnet of pure white, the color of high mourning.
Nodding again, the priest followed the laborers into the building. Farther down the hillside, an old woman knelt beside a burial jar whose paint had mostly weathered away to the pale red of sun-bleached terra-cotta. As Garric watched, she placed a bunch of flowers on the jar.
Liane turned and touched hands with Garric and Tenoctris both. She smiled sadly. “You two are all I have left now that I've lost my father,” she said. “Will you come with me to Erdin to learn what happened to him?”
Tenoctris looked at Garric, then at the younger woman. “The path to the answer may lead much farther than to Sandrakkan,
Liane,” Tenoctris said. “And it will certainly be dangerous. More dangerous than even you realize. I'm afraid that there are worse things than death.”
“I can't live without trying to learn,” Liane said simply. “I lost my father years ago but I looked the other way, I pretended what I saw wasn't really happening. I won't do that again.”
Tenoctris nodded. “So long as you understand,” she said. She turned and went on, “Then it's up to you, Garric. My path lies with you.”
She smiled broadly; it made her look like a different woman, far younger and more feminine. “I suppose it does, anyway. If I'm simply a pebble rolling downhill, then I suppose one bounce is as good as another.”
The priest preceded the four laborers from the building. They carried poles which were thrust through the ears of the jar into which Benlo's corpse had been folded. The only decoration on the jar's side was a starburst in white paint. The hot tar that sealed the lid over the body had a resinous, piney odor.
The two women were looking at Garric. “Yes,” he said. “I'll come with you, Liane.”
King Carus bellowed his world-filling laugh.
H
ali didn't often take her clients so far into the graveyard, but this boy was a butcher's assistant who was engaged a to his employer's daughter. Being caught with a prostitute would cost him his job as well as a profitable marriage.
Business among the cattlemen at the Red Ox was slow this evening. Hali didn't want to lose a potential customer just because he was nervous.
“Come along, lad,” she coaxed. “Here, this'll be a nice spot, don't you think?”
She patted the white stone wall of the tomb beside her. The graveyard was shaded and cool even during daylight; the flowers hanging on the door and laid on the pavement before the tomb were still fresh enough to perfume the air. “Now, just give me the money and we'll have a
good
time.”
The boy hesitated. He was a big youth with eyes too small and close-set to be attractive in his round face, but he had Hali's price, three coppers, in his purse. It was early evening; the sun had just set. Hali hadn't had a drink since noon and she
really
needed one. She planned to earn the three coppers and get straight back to the bar of the Red Ox with them.
She hitched up her tunic slightly, giving the boy a bit of a show. There was a vine-leaf pattern around the hem, worn now but good needlework. Hali had embroidered it herself not so many years ago when she was an honest woman earning an honest living; back when drink was a pleasure, not a need. A few years ago, and a whole lifetime past.
The boy wore his leather butcher's apron. He fumbled loose the strings to get at the purse hanging underneath, then paused again. “Say,” he said, looking about him in cowlike wonder. “Isn't this where the trouble was the other day?”
Sister take me for a fool, he's right!
Hali thought.
And the Sister take this pie-faced booby too, for insisting we come so far in when leaning against the inside wall is privacy enough!
The stableman from the Red Ox had gone along with the crew of undertakers and city marshals who collected the body two days past. He'd described the place where it happened: paired tombs facing one another across a stone patio. The white one was in use by the bor-Rusamans, a family in the shipping trade; the killing had taken place in the black tomb whose reputation had kept it vacant despite its good physical condition.
“No, no,” Hali lied. “That was clear the other side of the cemetery, honey. I went and saw the place myself and it was nowhere around here.”
She patted the tomb wall again. “Now, give me the money, sweetheart, and let's take care of our business, right?”
Now that the boy had brought the matter up, Hali started to worry. She wasn't a flighty woman, but the stableman had been too shaken by what he'd seen in the tomb to embellish the story the way he'd probably intended to do. His description of a disemboweled corpse with an expression of stark terror on its face was the more frightening to hear because it had obviously frightened the man talking.
The boy stared at her. The young fool had no more sense than the sheep he butchered.
How does he manage not to get hit on the head with a hammer himself and have his throat slit?
She sighed and stepped over to the boy, rotating the unfastened apron around to his back so that it wouldn't be in the way of business—and of the purse hanging from the boy's waist belt. It was getting noticeably darker.
His hands closed over the top of his purse. “Now, don't be a silly boy,” Hali wheedled. “You're too handsome to worry about nothing, now aren't you?”
Something crashed inside the tomb behind them. The boy jerked away from Hali. She turned. It was the sort of sound a burial jar would make in breaking apart.
“Now, don't worry about a few tiles falling off an old roof!” Hali said, her voice rising in desperation as she saw the evening's wine vanishing along with the frightened customer. “It's nothing—”
Blue light flared within the tomb, leaking out the iris ventilators in the gable peaks. The door's metal bolt sheared with a sharp crack.
The boy bellowed like a stuck pig and blundered off into the gathering night. Hali heard him fall over a stone coffin. She hoped bitterly for a moment that he'd managed to break his fool neck but he was up a moment later, running on and still screaming.
Hali backed against the side of the tomb. She needed a drink; and suddenly, nothing she might be running away from
seemed any worse than the life she'd be running to save.
The iron door squealed open. A man stepped out. He tramped slowly across the cemetery without looking around, vanishing at last behind a stand of centuries-old cypresses on his way toward the gate. There was a faint flicker when the man's legs moved, a dusting of blue light.
Hali recognized the fellow despite the dim light: Arame bor-Rusaman. She'd seen him several times being driven through the streets of Carcosa in a carriage with his coat of arms on the side. He was far too fine to be a customer of hers, of course, but sizing up men was an important part of Hali's business.
Three days ago Hali had seen Arame for the last time as the funeral procession made its way past the Red Ox. His features were painted larger than life on the sides of his burial jar.

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