Forest Mage

I had no dream that night. I awoke when the dawn pried its way though the cracks in my shutters. For a time I lay in my bed, wondering how I’d face this new day. Hitch was dead. I’d never realized how comforted I’d been to know someone else who was as infected with Speck magic as I was. While he had lived, there had been hope to clear my name. That was gone now. If Hoster lived, I’d face a court-martial. I pushed my fear down. I tried not to be the sort of man who would hope for another’s death.



I washed, cooked, and ate some porridge, and then emerged to a fine summer morning. The sky was an infinite, unclouded blue. Leaves on my hedge fluttered in the early-morning breeze. Birds were singing, and the summer day smelled new and alive. In anyone else’s life, it would have been a beautiful day, rich with promise. I went to fetch my shovel to finish filling in the woman’s grave.



The lid was crooked on Hitch’s coffin.



I didn’t have to look inside to know his body had been taken.



At one time, it would have been a hard decision. That morning, it wasn’t. I carried the empty coffin and lid out to the next available grave, lowered it in, and buried it. By the time Ebrooks and Kesey arrived with the first two corpse wagons of the day, I had Hitch’s coffin covered and had smoothed the mound over the woman I’d buried the night before.



“Looks like you got an early start on the day’s work,” Kesey observed.



“Looks like it,” I agreed.



CHAPTER THIRTY



THE APOLOGY



T he days creaked by on corpse-laden wagons. There was no respite from the parade of death that stopped at my door. Every morning I arose to bodies awaiting burial, and every evening I had to leave the dead in boxes outside my cabin. All day long, the tack-tack-tacking of the coffin makers was a steady counterpoint to the scrape of my shovel as I dug it into the earth. The bodies went from the wagons to coffins and quickly into the waiting graves. Whoever was in charge at Gettys sent us two more men to help cover the graves. The empty holes filled at an alarming rate.



The gallows humor of the first few days gave way to an unremitting gloom of spirit for all of us. We didn’t talk much. Most of my conversations were with Ebrooks and Kesey, and limited to the logistics of our tasks. How many coffins we had, how much wood was left, how many empty graves, how many coffins filled but unburied, how many bodies in the latest wagonload. I doggedly kept my tally of names, though often enough bodies came to the cemetery with little identification. Still, I logged them in as best I could: Old man, toothless, wearing worn cavalla trousers. Child, female, about five years old, blue dress, dark hair. Mother and infant, in nightwear, mother with red hair. The fourth day was hard for me. It seemed a day of dead children, and the little bodies looked lonely and abandoned, one to a coffin. Worst of all, mourners came that day, doggedly following the corpse wagons like hungry dogs hoping for a final bone. They watched us take the bodies from the cart and set them in the coffins, and their eyes seemed to blame me for taking their children from them. One mother, her eyes bright with fever, insisted that she must comb her little girl’s hair before I could put the lid on. What could I do but let her? She sat the child on her lap for that final grooming, and smoothed her hair and straightened the collar of her little nightshirt before tucking her into the coffin as if it were a truckle bed. Her husband took her away after that, but late that evening, on the final corpse cart of the day, she returned to us. I wished I could have buried her with her child. I kept dreading that I would recognize Amzil or one of her brood, but I was spared that.



The only body that I selfishly welcomed with relief came on the third day after I’d visited town. Sergeant Hoster arrived with his arms crossed on his chest, his eyes closed, his hair combed, and his face washed. A shiny whistle on a chain was enfolded in his stiff hands. Pinned to his shirt was a note in Epiny’s hand. “Bury him well. He was a good man.” She’d signed it with a simple “E.” For her sake, I did just that, though I privately thought that he had deceived her and the other women of the town with a fair face over a foul heart. The brief prayer I said over his grave was to the good god, and not for his mercy on Hoster but that Hoster’s accusations against me might be laid to rest with his bones.



Occasional mourners brought their own dead to the cemetery or followed the corpse cart. Usually they were parents mourning children. I dreaded to see them come, for I knew the burial they would see would offer them little comfort. There was no music, no solemn prayers, no bouquets or memorial of any kind, simply the efficient lowering of a coffin into the earth and the shoveling of soil down onto it. Perhaps that was all they came for, to be able to return to Gettys knowing the body of the one they had loved had been safely consigned to the earth.