Waker set down the pole and let the boat drift toward the raft. "Boy and a girl. Real nice. The boy has the old animal skills and the girl" Waker turned to look at Effie with his oversize bulging eyes. "She's a smart one. There's no telling all she can do."
Effie spat at him.
Waker's expression didn't change as the spittle landed on his cheek and in his eye. He blinked, and as he did so he seemed to be dismissing Effie Sevrance as someone who no longer held his interest. Raising his fist he wiped his face clean and returned his attention to the green-fur man.
"She's from Blackhail," Waker told him, "and the boy's a Bannerman."
The man's gaze settled on Effie. His eyes were the same black tar as the water. "Haul 'em up. Come see me tomorrow—I'll mind you get paid."
Waker's father steered the boat so it pulled alongside the raft. The woman with the coon hat set down her pole and gripped the boat's gunwales to dock the boat against raft. Waker turned to Chedd and said, "Up." He meant both of them, but he never looked at Effie Sevrance again.
Chedd and Effie stood, their leg chains rattling in unison. Understanding that they had limited movement, the green-fur man slid over to the edge of the raft and helped them alight. Chedd first. Effie next. The man's hands dug deep into Effie's armpits as she stumbled against him. "Good shot" he whispered, as he guided her down onto her backside. He might have winked at her, but she couldn't be sure.
As soon as she and Chedd were safely on board and sitting down, the coon hat woman pushed off from the boat. "Girlie, girlie, girlie, girlie. Never assume you'll he treated fairly."
It was the old man's idea of a farewell. Effie ignored it. She did not look at him or his son as the woman turned the raft and poled toward the Grayhouse.
"I reckon you'll both be hungry," said the green-fur man, tossing Effie and Chedd an apple each. "That Waker is a tight one with his stores."
Chedd and Effie looked at each other and then the apples. Was the green-fiir man trying to fatten them up?
Suspicious, Effie dropped her apple in the water. Chedd looked regretfully at his own apple but eventually did the same.
The green-fur man shrugged. The coon-hat woman shot out a hand and plucked Chedd's apple from the water.
"We won't go willingly to the bog," Effie said loudly and firmly. "We're prepared to fight."
The green-fur man chuckled knowingly. "Believe me, girl. If I intended to feed you to the bog, the pike would be eating your eyeballs by now."
Chedd Limehouse and Effie Sevrance exchanged a long and surprised glance as they floated across the black-water lake toward the Grayhouse on a raft made entirely of relief.
FORTY-ONE Raina Blackhail
Anwyn Bird was laid to rest in the manner of honored clansmen. Laida Moon, the clan healer, and Merritt Ganlow, the head widow, prepared the body over several days. Anwyn's brain was scraped out with a bladed spoon, and her torso was split open and the organ tree removed. Her skin was washed with milk of mercury and left overnight to dry. A soft putty of gray clay, silver filings, powdered guidestone and mercury salts was packed into her body cavity and skull. Her eyelids and mouth were drawn closed and sealed with clear resin. Laida fastened the torso with sutures of silver wire. Merritt brushed and braided the three-foot-long hair, securing it with a silver-and-jet clasp given by Raina Blackhail. The body was covered in a winding sheet of black linen and rested on a stone-and-timber plinth in the destroyed eastern hall.
As the women prepared the body the men rode out to the Oldwood to select and fell a basswood. A hundred-and-twenty-year tree was chosen and a loose line of over three hundred men formed, each waiting to take his turn with the ax. The felled log was limbed and dragged back to Blackhail by a team of horses. As the weather was judged uncertain it was brought into the house. Longhead hollowed it out with a carpenter's chisel, and the roughly finished log was left to cure for two days.
It had not been long enough, for the sap was still oozing and the sulfur wash that had been brushed on the inside walls now dripped on Anwyn's naked body. The clan matron had been entombed in the hollow of the tree. Raina shivered as she saw the yellow splotches on the mottled blue skin of the corpse. She stood on the greatcourt and watched the men lift the basswood onto a flat-bedded cart, their movements synchronized by terse orders from Orwin Shank. The great weight of the twelve-foot log made some of the older clansmen shake, but pride kept them shouldering their share of the burden.
Hundreds of clansmen and clanswomen stood in silence as Orwin Shank clicked the team of horses into motion and drove Anwyn Bird's body east toward the Wedge. It had been a small victory for Raina, that insistence that Anwyn not be laid to rest in the Oldwood as was planned and considered proper. She had won it not by reasonable argument or by wielding whatever small power she had left as chiefs wife. She had won it by a near-hysterical fit thrown in the presence of many people in the greathearth. "No," she had cried when she learned where Stannig Beade intended to place the body. "No. No. NO!"
After the outburst Stannig Beade had seemed pleased to let Raina have her way. It had been dark days for her then and she looked back now and realized she had lost some essential portion of control. And she was not sure she had it back.
Certainly she knew enough to play her role as grieving friend and chiefs wife on the greatcourt this gray and cloudy morning. She kept her silence and nodded acknowledgments at people, her bearing grave. But beyond that she felt wild and not-properly-hinged; an insane person playing at being sane.
People were treating her as if she were a damaged piece of pottery likely to break. They were careful with her, watchful, attempting to buffer her from shocks. Raina despised such treatment and would not normally have stood for it, but she could not rally the will to bring it to an end. It had its comforts, the buffering, the cautious care. She was fed and clucked over, shielded from the messages that arrived nearly daily from Ganmiddich and Bannen, and relieved of the duty of running this vast and creaking house.
Merritt had stepped into her place, emerging from the widows' hearth like an ancient warrior called by a sacred horn, Raina did not mind it much. At least Merritt was a Hailsman.
"Are you not coming?" Merritt said to her now as the cart lurched from the solid stone of the court onto the softer, lower surface of the road. "I'll walk with you."
The head widow's hand fluttered toward Raina's arm but Raina stepped away from it. She wanted no one touching her. "I am not going."
Merritt opened her mouth to protest this latest strangeness, but then thought better of it. Lips pressed into a tense line, she nodded curtly, and left to join the procession that was forming behind the cart.
Raina stood still against the flow of people. Corbie Meese, holding his delicate wife Sarolyn firmly by the waist, nodded to her as he passed. No man or woman would ride a horse to the laying-down of Anwyn Bird. They would walk the league and a half to the Wedge, where Stannig Beade would be waiting for them by a site he had deemed suitable to one of such high status. It would be a wooded glade cleared of snow or a stone bank above a stream, or perhaps she would be laid close to one of the paths so all that used the Wedge in the coming months would see her slowly blackening corpse and pay the respects that were its due.
Blackhail never buried its dead. They were left to rot on open ground, often in full view of hunting tracks, roads, rivers and lakes. Children who played in the woods and fields might stumble upon the hollowed-out basswoods and receive a lesson in death. No matter how beautifully a corpse was prepared, how it was nibbed with poisons and packed with precious metals, the flesh always corrupted in the end.