The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,51

that to her.

She’d burn the whorehouses, she decided. The survivors could survive a few nights in the open air. She had fire enough to keep them warm.

“General?” the scout asked quietly.

Rin blinked. She’d been staring after Venka’s retreating figure. “Give me a moment. I’ll meet you at the east gate.”

She returned to the general’s complex to change her boots and ask around the barracks until someone lent her a spare shovel. Then she followed the scout to the killing fields.

The walk was shorter than she expected.

She knew the site from a quarter-mile off. She knew it from the smell, the rancid odor of decay under a thin sheen of dust; from the fat insects scurrying into the ground and the carrion birds that perched casually on white bone fragments sticking out of the ground. She knew it from the discolored and displaced soil, and the traces of hair and clothes strewn across the dirt where the Mugenese had hardly bothered to bury them.

She stopped ten feet before she reached the graves. She needed to breathe before she could bring herself to go any farther.

“Let someone else do this.” Kitay put a hand on her shoulder. “You’re allowed to go back.”

“I’m not,” she said. “And I can’t. This has to be me.”

It had to be her because this was her fault. She was obligated to look. She needed to afford the dead at least that modicum of respect.

She wanted to bury it all, to pile mounds of soil over this shallow grave, tamp it tightly against the ground with shovels, and then roll wagons over it to flatten this site so that it might fade back into the landscape until one day they could pretend it had never existed.

But they had to identify the bodies. So many southerners were currently trapped in that horrifying limbo of uncertainty with no way to know if their loved ones were dead, and that uncertainty could hurt more than grief. Once they found the bodies, at least they could mourn.

And then, because burial rituals were so important in the south, the bodies needed to be cleaned. In peacetime, funerals in Tikany were daylong affairs. Hordes of mourners—sometimes including hired professionals to inflate the ranks, if the deceased’s family could afford it—moaned and wailed as they followed the coffin out of town to carefully prepared ancestral plots. The souls of the dead needed to be properly coaxed into their graves so they would rest instead of haunting the living; this demanded regular offerings of burned paper goods and incense to soothe them into the world beyond.

Rin had an idea of what the afterlife looked like now. She knew it was not some cute parallel ghost city where burned paper offerings might be translated into real treasures. But still, to leave a loved one’s body to rot in the open was shameful.

She’d thrown away most of her Rooster heritage. She’d lost her dialect and her mannerisms; since her first year at school, she’d dressed and spoken like a Sinegardian elite. She didn’t believe in southern superstition, and she wasn’t going to start pretending now.

But death was sacred. Death demanded respect.

Kitay had taken on the gray-green pallor of someone about to vomit.

She reached for his shovel. “You don’t need to stay if you can’t. These aren’t your people.”

“We’re bound.” He pulled his shovel back from her grasp and gave her a wan, exhausted smile. “Your pain will always be mine.”

Together they began to dig.

It wasn’t difficult. The Mugenese had covered their handiwork with only a thin layer of soil, barely enough to conceal the tangled mass of limbs underneath. Whenever Rin had uncovered enough dirt to reveal the top layer of a corpse, she stopped and moved on, not wanting to break apart the already soft, decomposing bodies.

“In the north, we burn our dead,” Kitay said after an hour. He reached up to wipe the sweat off his forehead, leaving behind a streak of mud. “It’s cleaner.”

“So we’re vulgar,” Rin said. “So what?”

She didn’t have the energy to defend what they were doing. Earthen burial was the oldest of southern rituals. The Roosters were people of the earth, and their bodies and souls belonged in the ground—ancestral land that was marked, possessed, inhabited by generations stretching back as long as the history of the province. So what if that made them the Empire’s mud-skinned refuse? The earth was permanent, unforgiving. The earth would rise up and swallow its invaders whole.

“They won’t be able to recognize half these bodies,”