Chapter One
The House of Saint Glinda
So the talk of random brutality wasn’t just talk. At noontime they
discovered the bodies of three young women, out on some mission of
conversion that appeared to have gone awry. The novice maunts had been
strangled by their ropes of holy beads, and their faces removed.
Her nerve being shaken at last, Oatsie Manglehand now caved in to the
demands of her paying customers. She told the team drivers they’d pause
only long enough to dig some shallow graves while the horses slaked their
thirst. Then the caravan would press on across the scrubby flats known,
for the failed farmsteads abandoned here and there, as the
Disappointments.
Moving by night, at least they wouldn’t make a sitting target, though they
might as easily wander into trouble as sidestep it. Still, Oatsie’s party
was antsy. Hunker down all night and wait for horse hoofs, spears? Too
hard on everyone. Oatsie consoled herself: If the caravan kept moving, she
could sit forward with her eyes peeled, out of range of the carping, the
second-guessing, the worrying.
With the benefit of height, therefore, Oatsie spotted the gully before
anyone else did. The cloudburst at sunset had fed a small trackside
rivulet that flowed around a flank of skin, water-lacquered in the new
moonlight. An island, she feared, of human flesh.
I ought to turn aside before the others notice, she thought; how much more
can they take? There is nothing I can do for that human soul. The digging
of another trench would require an hour, minimum. An additional few
moments for prayers. The project would only further agitate these clients
as they obsess about their own precious mortality.
Upon the knee of the horizon balanced the head of a jackal moon, so-called
because, once every generation or so, a smear of celestial flotsam
converged behind the crescent moon of early autumn. The impact was creepy,
a look of a brow and a snout. As the moon rounded out over a period of
weeks, the starveling would turn into a successful hunter, its cheeks
bulging.
Always a fearsome sight, the jackal moon tonight spooked Oatsie Manglehand
further. Don’t stop for this next casualty. Get through the
Disappointments, deliver these paying customers to the gates of the
Emerald City. But she resisted giving in to superstition. Be scared of the
real jackals, she reminded herself, not frets and nocturnal portents.
In any case, the light of the constellation alleviated some of the color
blindness that sets in at night. The body was pale, almost luminous.
Oatsie might divert the Grasstrail Train and give the corpse a wide berth
before anyone else noticed it, but the slope of the person’s shoulders,
the unnatural twist of legs – the jackal moon made her read the figure
too well, as too clearly human, for her to be able to turn aside.
“Nubb,” she barked to her second, “rein in. We’ll pull into flank
formation up that rise. There’s another fatality, there in the runoff.”
Cries of alarm as the news passed back, and another mutter of mutiny: Why
should they stop? – were they to bear witness to every fresh atrocity?
Oatsie didn’t listen. She yanked the reins of her team of horses, to halt
them, and she lowered herself gingerly. She stumped, her hand on her sore
hip, until she stood a few feet over the body.
Face down and genitals hidden, he appeared to have been a young man. A few
scraps of fabric were still knotted about his waist, and a boot some yards
distant, but he was otherwise naked, and no sign of his clothes.
Curious: no evidence of the assassins. Neither had there been about the
bodies of the maunts, but that was on rockier ground, in a drier hour.
Oatsie couldn’t see any sign of scuffle here, and in the mud of the gulch
one might have expected … something. The body wasn’t bloody, nor
decayed yet; the murder was recent. Perhaps this evening, perhaps only an
hour ago.
“Nubb, let’s heave him up and see if they’ve taken his face,” she said.
“No blood,” said Nubb.
“Blood may have run off in that cloudburst. Steel yourself, now.”
They got on either side of the body and bit their lips. She looked at
Nubb, meaning: It’s only the next thing, it’s not the last thing. Let’s
get through this, fellow.
She jerked her head in the direction of the hoist. One, two, heave.
They got him up. His head had fallen into a natural scoop in the stone, a
few inches higher than where the rain had pooled. His face was intact,
more or less; that is to say, it was still there, though shattered.
“How did he get here?” said Nubb. “And why didn’t they scrape him?”
Oatsie just shook her head. She settled on her haunches. Her travelers had
come forward and were congregating on the rise behind her; she could hear
them rustling. She suspected that they had gathered stones, and were ready
to kill her if she insisted on a burial.
The jackal moon rose a few notches higher, as if trying to see into the
gulley. The prurience of the heavens!
“We’re not going to dig another grave.” That from her noisiest client, a
wealthy trader from the northern Vinkus. “Not his, Oatsie Manglehand, and
not yours, either. We’re not doing it. We leave him unburied and alone, or
we leave him unburied with your corpse for company.”
“We don’t need to do either,” said Oatsie. She sighed. “Poor, poor soul,
whoever he is. He needs no grave. He isn’t dead yet.”
In time, when the travelers had rejoined their cronies and relatives in
the Emerald City – in salons, in public houses, in taverns of
exchange – they heard more chatter about the hostilities they had managed to
sidestep. Rumor flourished. Forty, sixty, a hundred deaths resulting from
the skirmishes between the Scrow and the Yunamata. Barbarians, the lot of
them: They deserved to kill off each other. But not us.
(Continues…)
Regan Books
ISBN: 0-06-054893-2
Excerpted from Son of a Witch
by Gregory Maguire Excerpted by permission.
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