A Time of Exile - Katharine Kerr [198]
“You and the men certainly trampled all over everything, Maddo,” he grumbled.
“Well, we looked for footprints and tracks and suchlike. If they’d left a trail we would have found it, but you’ve got to remember that the ground was frozen hard when this happened.”
“True enough. Where’s the third lad, the one who almost got away?”
Maddyn took him across the field to the sprawled and puffing corpse. In the warming day the smell was loathsome enough to make the bard keep his distance, but Nevyn knelt right down next to the thing and began to examine the ground as carefully as if he were looking for a precious jewel. Finally he stood up and walked away with one last disgusted shake of his head.
“Find anything?”
“Naught. I’m not even sure what I was hoping to get, to tell you the truth. It just seems that …” Nevyn let his words trail away and stood there slack-mouthed for a moment. “I want to wash my hands off, and I see a stream over there.”
Maddyn went with him while he knelt down and scrubbed his hands in the rivulet. All at once the old man went tense, his eyes unfocused, his mouth slack again, his head tilted a little as if he listened to a distant voice. Only then did Maddyn notice that the streamlet brimmed with glassy blue undines, rising up in crests and wavelets. In their midst, and yet somehow beyond them, like a man coming through a doorway from some other place, was a presence. Maddyn could barely see it, a vast silvery shimmer that seemed to partake of both water and air like some preternatural fog, forming itself into shapes that might not even have existed beyond his desire to see it as a shape. Then it was gone, and Maddyn shuddered once with a toss of his head.
“Geese walking on your grave?” Nevyn said mildly.
In his role as a learned man Nevyn recited a few suitable lines of Dawntime poetry over the corpses, then the silver daggers mounted up and left the servants to get on with the burying. Maddyn spurred his horse up next to the old man’s and mentioned the decrepit hunting lodge.
“It’ll be better shelter than none, truly,” Nevyn said.
“You don’t suppose our enemies camped there, do you?”
“They might have once, but they’re long gone by now. Tell the men we won’t be out hunting wild geese long, Maddo. I just want one last look around, that’s all.”
Only then was Maddyn sure that he had indeed seen some exalted personage in the stream.
At sunset they reached the lodge, a wooden round-house, its thatch half-gone, standing along with a stable behind a broken-down palisade. As soon as they rode within five hundred yards of the place the horses turned nervous, tossing their heads and blowing, dancing a little in the muddy road. Maddyn had the feeling that they would have bolted if they hadn’t been tired from their long ride.
“Oho!” Nevyn said. “My liege, you wait here with Caradoc and most of the men. Maddyn, you, Owaen, and Branoic come with me.”
“You’d better take more men than that. Councillor,” Maryn said.
“I won’t need a small army, my liege. Most like there’s naught left here but bad memories, anyway.”
“But the horses—”
“See things men don’t see, but men know things that horses don’t know. And with that riddle, you’ll have to rest content.”
Nevyn was right enough, although the ‘bad memory’ turned out to be bad indeed. The men dismounted and walked to the lodge, and as soon as they stepped through the gap they saw and smelled what had been spooking the animals. Nailed to the inside of the palisade was the corpse of a man, half-eaten by ravens and well ripened by the spring weather. Yet the worst thing wasn’t the stench. The corpse was hung upside down and mutilated—the head cut off and nailed between its legs with what seemed to be—from the fragment left—its private parts stuffed into its mouth. Branoic stared for a long moment, then turned and ran to the shelter of the palisade to vomit.
For all his aplomb earlier, Nevyn looked half-sick now, his face dead white and looking with all its wrinkles more like old parchment than