Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [105]
But was he?
As soon as I had recovered enough breath and wits—dirt in my mouth, worms in my eyes, earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—I examined Bat. He had jumped up and stood gazing wildly around, panting in great sobs, waving his knife as he looked for something to attack. I said imperiously, “It’s all right, Bat. I have brought you back from Witchland. Kneel!”
He did, looking glad to have a clear order. Orders were something he could understand. Nothing else was. On his knees, he raised his face to mine. “Bat be saved from Witchland?”
“Yes. Yes.”
What convinced me was his smell, so strong that I had to back away. In the country of the Dead, odors were not strong. I’d had to hold Cecilia in my arms before I could catch the fragrance of her hair. But now Bat reeked of sweat, of piss, of dirt, of the sea salt dried on his tattered clothes. He was solidly here, embodied in the land of the living. He was alive, and he stunk to the sky.
All at once my legs gave way and I had to sit on the ground. Bat was alive. And I had done this. I, Roger, the hisaf.
“So it is with a hisaf. So it was with your father. Or you could not be.”
Could my father have done this? Perhaps this was what Soulviners meant by “living forever”—that the Dead could be brought back to life. If my father had not left us before she died, could he have brought back my mother? And if he could have done so, and had chosen not to . . .
Hatred exploded in me for this unknown man, and it was the hatred that finished me. Too much, too fast. Maggie, Bat, Cecilia . . . I burst into uncontrollable tears. Shamed, I rolled over, hid my face, and sobbed like the six-year-old I had been when my mother died. I cried and I could not stop crying.
Bat tended me. Murmuring nonwords, he covered me with my own cloak. He found water somewhere and fetched me a few drops in a young leaf. He sat beside me, a huge and stinking man, and patted my shoulder until the paroxysm passed.
“All right, Bat. All right. I am fine.”
“Sir Witch,” he slurred. “Ye fine?”
“I’m fine.”
“Ye fine?”
“I’m fine. Thank you, Bat.” Now another problem occurred to me—what was I going to do with him? “Do you know where you are?”
He gestured toward the beach and said simply, “Sea.”
Of course. He was a sailor. Wherever the sea was, Bat was at home. He would accompany me to where the coastline flattened, find a ship to sign on to, and resume the life that Hartah had stolen from him—and all without ever realizing that same life had ever been extinguished. If he spoke of Witchland, mumbled of it in his feebleminded slur, no one would believe him.
Suddenly I wanted him gone. I wanted to be alone, to cross over and bring back Cecilia. Nothing else mattered, nothing else filled my mind. . . .
Why did hisafs not always bring back their beloved Dead?
The question needled me, and would not go away. One possible answer: Perhaps they did. But if so, why had my father not retrieved my mother? That brought me back to my oldest questions: Why had he left her in the first place, and what had happened in Hygryll to cause her death? If I had found her in the country of the Dead on Soulvine Moor, I could have asked her these questions. But I had not found her, and I was not returning to Soulvine Moor just now. I had to bring Cecilia back over.
But first I had to rest. Everything in me had gone weak, used up with unnatural effort. From my pocket I fished out six pennies and gave them to Bat. “Here, find a cottage—or someplace—and buy bread and cheese. Bring it here.” Almost before the words were out, I was asleep, lying there on the track between the cliff and the clearing where the yellow-haired youth had died kicking the empty air. I must have slept around the clock, because when I woke, it was once again afternoon, the sun blazing through the half-unfurled leaves, and Bat was gone.
A loaf of bread, already crawling with ants, lay on the ground beside me. The goatskin water bag was