that wants to speak against that should speak it now.”
Nobody said a word.
“Good then,” Catrin said. “The laying out of the body and the cleaning of Molo’s room is share-works. I want three souls for each. Tonight we’ll drink and sing his good passage, and tomorrow, assuming there’s clouds in the sky, we’ll have the burial.”
We all waited to be dismissed.
“One more thing,” Catrin said. “Glad tidings on the back of sad ones. My son, Haijon, and Spinner Tanhide are pair-pledged and mean to be wed. I hope you’ll give them your good wishes.”
Cheers went up on all sides. I think it was only me that stayed silent. My mother studied my face a while, then put her arm across my shoulders and give me a squeeze.
“There’s other hens in the yard, Koli,” she murmured.
My heart was freighted too heavy to answer.
13
I will pass over the wake, if you don’t mind. Wakes has always struck me strange, and this one was stranger than any I ever went to. I was grieving a double grief, and one of them (the selfish and stupid one) I could not speak.
Everyone else was in a more mixed-up place than that, being sad for Molo and happy for his daughter being taken into the Ramparts. Nothing could go ill for her now. She was gathered up, and safe, at the very moment when she might otherwise of been most sadly lost and alone. It was a good end, like the last words of a story. And so they lived after, long and happy, until they died.
How could I not want that for her? How could I put my own self and the things I dreamed of before Spinner’s coming down, light and easy, in a bed all of softest duck-feathers?
I could not rejoice, and I will not disguise it. I thought of things that had passed between us and my heart said no. This thing could not be. It could not be her bedtime-story happiness, because she was meant to be happy with me and she must know that. What she had with Haijon was different and less.
I was not so lost to sense that I thought like this all the time. Only I could not put it wholly out of my mind, nor bring myself to be joyful over something that seemed like a bad mistake, a thing gone where it wasn’t meant to go.
We buried Molo in the little plot in the half-outside where all our dead was laid. Catrin said some words over him, and Spinner done likewise. They was Dandrake words, which come as a surprise to me. I never knowed until then that Molo believed in Dandrake. I knowed Spinner didn’t, and thought that must of been on account of how she was raised.
But it struck me strange for another reason too. Molo was ever a kind-hearted man, and Dandrake’s teachings don’t incline much in that direction. They come down to us from around about the time when the old world fell to pieces, and they have got that flavour running all through them. Most especially in the seven hard lessons, which Catrin spoke at Molo’s burying.
“The first lesson is that god isn’t looking at us no more.
“The second, that he won’t look again until all men and women live by the right.
“The third, that them as won’t live by the right themselves got to be made to do it by pain and preaching, and by the marks of godhead made in their mortal flesh.”
And so on. It only gets worse from there, so I stopped listening.
Dandrake lived by his own rules, if the stories are true. He roused up his followers to a holy war, and marched them south to London. They was going to whelm the city, kill the king along with all his Count and Seal, and build the holy kingdom of Shrewshalem right here in Ingland. They didn’t get there though. They had got to cross the Fathom and the Curtain first, and that was no easy thing. The king’s men met them there and sowed the land with their blood, in the place that’s now called Skullfield, and that was how they knowed they wasn’t yet righteous enough to get the job done. As for Dandrake, they never found his body, so either he was took up to Heaven to be with the dead god and the ever-living, or else he found some other way out of that situation. Such as, it might be, running