Buel continued to stare at us. No. At me. Waiting. I spoke within Soldier’s Boy. “I don’t have to forgive Buel Hitch. He wasn’t who betrayed me. The magic did that.”
I felt Soldier’s Boy scowl and knew he had heard me. When Buel grinned again, I knew he had, too. “No matter who did it, Nevare, I’m sorry it happened. But I can’t be sorry for what it bought me. This.”
“You enjoy being a tree?” Behind me, the others were finishing their task. Dasie’s body was encased in the freezing blanket and covered now with a shroud of snow. Her feeders were caressing the snow as if they were smoothing a delicate coverlet over a sleeping child.
“Being a tree.” He smiled. “I suppose that’s one way of seeing it.” He sighed then, not the sigh of a man who is discouraged but rather as a man sighs with satisfaction at the completeness of his life.
“Nevare!” Jodoli called him. Soldier’s Boy turned to look at him, and the Great Man gestured. The others were gathering in a circle about Dasie and her tree. He was expected to join them.
As he walked away, Buel spoke after us, his words intended for me. He was not yet strong in his tree. His voice faded as we moved away from him, but the words he spoke reached me still.
“It’s worth it, Nevare. No matter what it takes from you. No matter what you have to give up. No matter what you have to do. It’s worth it. Relax into it, old son. Give way to the magic. You won’t be sorry. I promise.”
Soldier’s Boy gave a short nod. I held myself still and stubborn inside him. No.
He turned away from the tree and the huddle of snow that still, now that he looked at it, echoed the shape of a man’s seated body trussed to the tree’s trunk. The others were gathering around Dasie’s tree where a similar but much larger mound of snow marked her “grave.” Soldier’s Boy went over to them. As he plodded through the snow, Jodoli joined him. He spoke as if their quarrel had never been, or as if he had dismissed it as insignificant. “It is good that the tree took her in. She chose the tree years ago, when first she knew she would be a Great One, and has visited it yearly, giving it offerings of her blood to awaken it to her and claim it. Still, in very cold weather, it has sometimes happened that a tree does not accept the Great One’s body. Then there is little that anyone can do.”
“What happens now?”
“Now we will sing a farewell to her. Our songs will remind her of who she was, so that as she is taken into the tree, her memories remain strong. Of course, it should be her entire kin-clan here to sing her into her tree, rather than just two of her feeders and a handful of her guard. But we are here. Nevare, we would be very wise to honor her with very long songs, as long as we can sing, of everything that we know about her. Do you understand?”
“I think I do.” He meant it would be politically wise. “I will watch you and then I will do my best.”
“Very well. Let us join them.”
It was as unlike a Gernian burial as I could imagine. We formed a circle around the tree and held hands. This required baring our hands to the cold, as the skin-to-skin contact was deemed very important. A few moments after we had joined hands, I understood why. I could feel the magic flowing through the circle of linked hands with the same sensation of moving current as if we all held on to a pipe with water flowing through it, through us.
Her feeders began the songs, as was their right. It was not a song so much as a chant; it had no melody and it did not rhyme. The first man recounted everything he could recall of her, from the moment he had first met her to his days of being her feeder right up to her death. He chanted until his voice gave out and then on until he could barely croak out the words. When he finally could say no more, his fellow feeder took up the tale, again recounting how he had met Dasie and on through all the days and ways he had served her. He avoided repetition of events that the first feeder had covered. Even so, before her feeders were finished the brief day was ending.
But the cover of night brought no respite. The chant went on, passed from guard to guard to guard, with each fondling his memories of Dasie and trying to recall for the dead woman how she had looked and spoken, what she had eaten or worn, how she had laughed at a humorous event or mourned a sad one. Not all the memories were kind. Some spoke of her when she was a small girl and prone to cruelty to smaller children. Others spoke of her temper as a grown woman. Some wept as they spoke of Dasie and losing her, but as often they laughed or shouted as they recalled memories of her. One spoke in detail of her activities on the day of the battle. I cringed as he spoke of the deaths they had witnessed, and of those she had killed with her own hand. But the guard spared us no detail. All, all must be spoken to preserve it in the dead woman’s memory.