Complete Short Fiction, page 135
The sea breeze rattled shutters already closed despite the still-abundant daylight. Her boots alone crunched the street’s crushed shells. Even the ever-present cats had slunk off to chew their fish heads somewhere they wouldn’t need to look at her.
This was unusually bad. She was certainly used to the change that came during the last days of a trading trip, when her need became obvious. Smiling faces turned to cold masks and then disappeared behind bolted doors. Children who had once followed her around now hid behind fences and winged pebbles at her. And the streets grew miraculously empty.
But usually someone sought her out before the last day, to privately make an exchange.
Her fellow traders had good reason not to come down to the coast, despite the access to overseas goods: people here didn’t feel compelled by their own gods to do the necessary thing. Tromvi couldn’t worry about whether that would eventually doom them to revenge by inland gods. She needed a corpse to get home, and she needed it now.
Tall and sober, blue eyes sharp under a felt hat shapeless from too many rains, she walked the lanes of town, hoping for a glimpse of someone around a corner, or an eye in the gap beneath a loose shutter. She had noted a couple of people in town with the drawn look of someone worried about a poor burial decision. So she walked, visible and obvious, past the places where these people lived. Under her hat her hair cascaded in curls, white edged in black, like a mountain thundercloud. Her homespun cloak had a pattern from the new western valleys where her children had settled. It wasn’t like anyone could miss her. Still, no one darted out to reveal the location of an inappropriately buried body that needed to return to its birthplace.
She knew traders who left on their return journey home with this essential task undone. One such had spent an entire evening at a tavern explaining to Tromvi how exciting it was. to always be on the lookout for an uncomfortably buried body, with the possibility of an exciting discovery around each bend of the trail. He eventually ended up frozen to a tree below the bolted door of a mountain Gatehouse, not permitted to pass, and unable to descend due to an early storm. The next spring, Tromvi had been asked to take him home. She spared a prayer to his god to receive his body kindly and at full value, but already had a proper corpse, and so left him for someone who could use him.
A gust of wind brought her an out-of-place sound: the clang of a goat bell. She turned to see a nanny trot out onto the road. It glanced at her, then was on its way, seeming in a bit of a hurry, bell still clanging. That was a sound from the hills and the wide plains to the north of the mountains. She had not heard of anyone here keeping one.
She walked out past the last house to where the horses of her pack train cropped rough seaside grass. She got on her lead horse and headed up the road north. It wasn’t the direction home. Her last possible chance lay this way.
A man had come down from a farm up there to sell grapes and raisins, many of them to Trumvi’s friend Nemillo, the eastern captain. The grape seller had glanced at Tromvi, then away. Despite her age, some men still managed enough interest to look at her. She could tell this was something different.
Always laying up knowledge against a dearth, she had learned that he was named Wult, that he had married a woman from far inland who had never made close friends in town, and that she had died of a fever a couple of months before. That was before people realized the import of such questions, and stopped talking to her. But she had learned enough.
An hour or so up the rough road north. Tromvi found a spot beneath a rocky cliff, with a view of the crashing ocean, and tied up her horses. She took a moment to look out over the purpling water to the level line of the horizon, seeking Nemillo’s sails. Once or twice she thought she found his ship. Each time it proved to be a whitecap that then slid down into the water and vanished.
She led the last horse, the one bearing nothing but the reindeer-hide sack, down the trail into the inlet. After a couple of steep turns, well reinforced with laid stacks of rocks, the sound of the surf had vanished, and she was at a low house partly concealed by twisted pear trees.
Wult sat on a tree stump in front of his house repairing a net. He was tall, with sharp joints, a look Tromvi had always favored: big chin, stuck out ears, and a brush of reddish hair topping his long head. Her own husband, Greevor, had been much of that look, and that had been part of the joy of him.
He set his net aside.
“How did she first let you know?” Tromvi asked, because it had to be something like that, some power from the woman’s home god. Nothing else could have gotten one of these sullen seasiders to ask for help, their own god being so lax.
“She’s been dead two months,” Wult said. “The air thickened in her chest until she could no longer breathe it. I buried her in my family’s plot. One morning a week or two later, I felt her near me, pushing against my shoulder in bed. I rolled over to put my arm around her. It was just the blanket, knotted up. It had come off me. I was cold. When I got up, something stuck to my foot.” He paused.
“What?”
“Fish scales. Fish scales all over the floor. Morning light came in, and they gleamed, from one wall to the other.”
“Had you fought about that?”
“Fought?” Wult said.
“About fish scales.”
“She was a mountain girl. I was up in the valleys to stay with mothers cousins for my away. They taught me history, and the ties between our places. And every week it was climbing. Cliffs and ice. They said I would get used to it. I never knew there was so much down in the world. I was on a cliffside praying I wouldn’t fall and looked down to see a girl laughing up at me from the back of a horse, on the trail far below. I climbed down, and she was still there.”
Trading the smell of wet wool for the stink of fish scales—one definition of love. “You would track scales in.”
“You can’t really do anything about that!” An old grievance found its way into his voice. “They are . . . everywhere.” He closed his eyes. “But these were beautiful. Like a mountain weaving, made out of fish scales. Loops, twists, knots. Genuinely beautiful.”
“Who’s going to clean that mess up?” Tromvi wasn’t going to let him off easy.
“It will stay. Until I am ready, it will stay Do you want to see it?”
“No. What next?”
Wult just turned and walked silently around the house. She took her horse’s bridle and followed.
Behind the house was a vineyard, heavy with ripening grain’s. These were what Wult had been selling when Tromvi spotted him in town. He waited, for it took Tromvi a moment to see it.
Each tendril that held the vine to its trellis had been knotted, sometimes multiple times. Each grape stem was knotted as well. No living hand could have done that without breaking the stems.
“Did she usually repair your nets? Mountain girls make rugs, and decorate the edges of homespun. They have nimble fingers.”
“I was trying to save her from misery.” He looked across the vines. “She was fleeing something terrible, a bad choice she had made, when, she said, she looked up and saw me holding onto the rock like a baby clinging to its mother, and realized you could also move toward something. Toward here, it turned out, where she never felt at home. She’s telling me what a big mistake that was, now . . .”
“She’s not the one speaking to you.” Tromvi knew the truth wasn’t really comforting, but it was all she had. “She’s buried out of place. That usually doesn’t matter as much as it should. Sometimes, though, a god wants to make sure someone returns to it. It strengthens their urge to return. The god in whose territory the body is buried feels the irritation, like a boil or a rubbing collar, and eventually moves to do something about it. The results can be unpleasant. She needs to go home.”
Wult stood with his head bent for long minutes. There was a time in every trade when this moment came. Tromvi knew better than to speak, though she was desperate to be on her way. It was the ability to remain silent that distinguished a successful trader from one who perpetually failed to realize value.
“This way.” Wult grabbed a shovel from the neat line of tools behind the house, and led Tromvi from the vineyard, up over a rise, and down to a sheltered flat area. Boulders etched with a few runes each marked where the graves were. “My parents. An aunt, and a few elders, forgotten. And . . . her.” His eyes widened and the shovel fell from his hand.
The newest grave’s soil had been disturbed and then patted back down, handprints visible in the soft. dirt. Remu herself lay on the slope above the little cemetery, amid the summer flowers.
She lay on her back, eyes closed, dressed in a simple shift with some embroidery at the hem. Her light brown hair was tied and braided in the shoreline fashion—Tromvi imagined the village women doing their necessary work, while feeling secretly pleased that, at least once, this outland woman would have her hair done properly.
She was clearly dead, with her skin pulling in folds over her cheekbones. But not two months dead. Nothing had eaten her eyes. She lay amid the purple and yellow flowers of the wild pansy called Hearts Ease. She had dried flower heads amid her fingers. Bees buzzed higher up the slope. The preservation of her body showed that her god had an unusually strong interest in her return.
“Remu loved flowers,” Wult said over Tromvi’s shoulder. “Particularly spring flowers in the mountains. Blue ones, she said. Dark blue. Did her ghost come out just to pick them?”
From what was on the corpse’s fingers, Tromvi rather thought Remu had been deadheading the blossoms, like someone ensuring a continued show of bloom by her front stoop.
“She’s not a ghost,” Tromvi said. “She’s just not buried in the right place, and the god here has been prodded by hers into doing something about it. I will do the duty and return her. Where was her home?”
“Hellstor.”
That was good luck. Hellstor was within two passes of Krovisklull, Tromvi’s home. Men from Krovisklull regularly moved up to work in the Hellstor copper mines and just as regularly died of drylung there. Hellstor would not lack for corpses needing to be repaid to the god of Krovisklull. After picking one up, home would be a quick downslope.
“She told me that from the heights of Hellstor, on a certain day of the year, you could look down at the Moon and see that there is a hole in the top of it,” Wult said. “As if it is a bead from a broken necklace.”
“Each mountain valley has its own special view of things.” Tromvi pulled the soft reindeer-hide sack oft the horse’s back. “There is no need for you to watch this.”
Wult’s prominent voice box moved up and down. Then he turned and walked away, out of sight.
Tromvi immediately regretted not requesting his help. Remu was heavier than she looked, and her limbs flopped around as Tromvi tried to shove her into the sack. She tried not to grunt, and certainly not to swear. Eventually, somehow, she got Remu fully in and stitched up the opening.
The largest corpse shed carried in that sack had been that of a man nearly seven feet tall, and she’d felt discomfort at the way his head and knees visibly pressed out against the soft leather. The smallest was a child from Korbath who’d fled her home with her parents only the week before and been unable to withstand the winds of the heights they had been forced into. Tromvi wrapped the hide around her three times but still felt the cold radiating from her as she took the girl back to Korbath. The parents had continued on their trek alone.
Wult returned when her job was done.
“Remu would come out here and sit among the bees,” he said. “I didn’t like it. I never learned what she was fleeing when she saw me and changed her life. There was some darkness, some magic she had delved into, probably with others. She said her honey was just a simple housewife’s spell, nothing deeper or darker than that, but I didn’t believe her. My suspicion hurt her, I could see. We would fight. Finally I left her to her bees. But that led to even worse things.”
He looked at the spot where his dead wife’s body had lain. The bees seemed to find it particularly interesting: a half dozen buzzed around the flowers crushed by her weight.
“The women here already knew everyone they cared to know. They barely spoke to her. Her bees wandered these fields and rocks and made a shoreline honey. She thought if the other women tasted their own sunlight, gentian, and dune plum blossom in the honey, they would grow easier with her. She took each of them a dripping comb of it and was welcomed. Maybe they regretted their earlier coldness. Unfortunately, soon after they tasted it. several of the women developed an urge to . . . to . . . milk a goat.”
“But. how?” Despite herself, Tromvi found herself interested. “What did the honey do?”
“It was not a simple domestic trick, that became clear. There had been a laborer here who had come down from the north after a bad winter. He worked various farms and slept out. He even worked here with me, helping harvest grapes. The night before Remu’s bees finished the honey, he had died, alone, in a field of flowers. The bees, she told me, must have harvested his last thoughts along with the nectar of the blossoms. And, it seemed, he had once been a shepherd, up there in the north.”
“Someone did get a goat “Tromvi said. “I saw it, in town.”
Wult buried his face in his hands. “Everyone will know who couldn’t resist. It will be a deep shame.”
“No one would speak to Remu again “Tromvi said.
“No. No one. She had only me, and I was angry at her myself She did her job, I did mine.” His fingertips stroked the soft leather of the sack that held his wife’s body. “You need to go. If you head further north, and then west, there is a convenient spot to camp, two miles along, where the trail crosses the stream. Tomorrow, if you continue on that way, you will strike the main route west.”
A week later the setting sun caught Tromvi climbing the long ridge toward Crowfoot Pass as fast as she could. She was far from anywhere she wanted to be and moving farther from it. Views along the Spine to east and west opened out around hen chevrons of stippled snow, blue crags, cascades that flashed in the last of the light. She paid no attention to any of it.
During her time trading by the sea, two warriors in the southeastern plains had quarreled, and one had hacked the other to death near a spring sacred to the dead man’s family. The result was a wide feud through the southern lands, pulling in close relatives, collateral relatives, and people who had once shared a piece of dried reindeer meat with the wrong stranger. Armed bands now clinked along the trails.
Tromvi had faced down any number of tough negotiators, but the thought of a swinging ax in a gauntleted hand filled her with terror. She couldn’t talk her way past it. To evade the violence, she’d been forced off her chosen route. The horses caught her mood, and, despite the occasional headshake and snort, kept up the pace.
There was another east to west route up here, along the higher slopes of the Spine, that would lead to Hellstor while keeping her away from the combat below. It had more up and down than she liked. Her horses would reach home thin and unhappy. But she had little choice.
She’d been catching glimpses of the Crowfoot Pass Gatehouse’s stone tower for a day and a half. It never seemed to get any closer. Now the trail took a jog around a ridge, climbed out of the last of the trees, and emerged on the rough stone of the pass itself. The tower loomed over her.
At the gate’s pointed arch, she grabbed a hanging metal bar and struck the bell for entry.
“So this woman died at the seashore? Hakratt, the Passkeeper of Crowfoot Pass, stopped so suddenly near the top of the winding stairs that Tromvi almost collided with him. “But she was from Hellstor. Definitely from Hellstor. How did she end up there?”
“She met a man from there,” Tromvi said. “And returned with him to his home by the sea.”
“That doesn’t seem like enough reason. She died down there, after all. She probably knew she would. Something must have . . . driven her.”
Hakratt’s large body blocked the way up, and Tromvi found herself clinging desperately to the worn stone step with her toes, finding nothing on the rough walls to grab on to. It was a long way down.
“She was fleeing something,” Tromvi said.
“Ah. What was her life like, do you know? Children?”
“I saw no children. Otherwise . . . I don’t know.”
“Better so. Did her husband know what she fled?
It wasn’t like a Passkeeper to gossip about the past life of a god-bound corpse or even to acknowledge its existence after he took it away and performed the secret procedures Passkeepers used to confirm the body’s home god. Hakratt, clearly punctilious, had taken quite a long time with the corpse before emerging and performing the ritual of acceptance. And now he was just going to stand there until Tromvi lost her grip on the sloping stone step and tumbled down the winding stairs.
Or told him something else.
“She never told him why. She never said anything. Her past was a mystery to him.”
Either that satisfied him or he remembered his manners, because he finally led her into the top tower room, a surprisingly large space. A fire burned in tire fireplace, and food had already been laid on a table. A couple of carved bench chests against the walls and the folding stools by the table were the only moveable furniture.
“Ale for the trader,” Hakratt told the young woman who stood against the wall. “Ah, and cheese. I see we have some left.”
He settled at the table with a goblet of ale and a wooden plate. Tromvi noted that he had taken most of the cheese. “This isn’t your usual route to the west. I’ve never seen you here before.”
“No. There is a feud, to the south.”
“And those squabbling warriors below scared you.”
