Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [124]
“True, but the family who put them in that hole are almost certainly dead. You have dug up the bones of their tradition, young Bec; put them back.”
Grandfather reached out with his hand, but Bec refused to meet him halfway.
“What kind of tradition?” he demanded. “A good kind, or a bad kind, like with the ’Reelan’s?”
“A good kind, the kind that holds families together.”
Bec took the signet stones onto his palm and studied them skeptically. “How?”
“In the old days—the very old days when I was young—it was the custom—and had been since Emperor Naihikaris decreed it at the Founding—to bury the dead in open fields far outside the city walls. Those with fortune, prestige, and the proper inclination built small, open galleries over their graves which they visited once a year, on the new moon of the vernal equinox (and gods help them all if the ground had not hardened from the winter thaw by then!).
“One supper a year, Naihikaris thought, was more than enough time spent with ancestors. But Naihikaris was an orphan, and his four sons outlived him; he knew nothing about grief or mourning. The citizens loved him as the font of glory; they obeyed him, and they defied him. They buried their dead in the open fields, but they dug reliquaries inside their homes: small pits about so big—” Grandfather framed a familiar shape with his hands. “When a woman dies, a piece of her jewelry is interred—not the precious kind-that gets passed along—but the everyday sort; or some domestic item more cherished than valued. When a man dies, they wrap his personal seal in clay. For a child, a favorite toy—unless the child were so young that its name hadn’t yet been written in the rolls; those they bury inside their houses. You can be sure that several times a year the cache you’ve found was opened and everything within was passed from hand to hand through the family. When you hold the signet your father once held, it is very much like having a piece of him in your hand—”
“Inside?” Bec gasped. He’d stopped listening when Grandfather described the fate of infants. “They buried the babies inside their houses? I didn’t see any bones, I swear. I wouldn’t have touched any baby’s bones.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. Babies are buried beneath the kitchen hearth, where they’ll stay warm forever. Do you know that the Irrune do very much the same thing—burying children beneath a fire rather than immolating them within its flames?”
The boy shook his head. “Momma’s never told me any of this.” He folded his arms over his heart. “There aren’t any babies buried in her kitchen. No relic holes, neither.”
Grandfather took a breath for words, then didn’t say them. He took a second breath. “I said the traditions had died. Perhaps your mother didn’t know where her family’s reliquaries were kept, or perhaps there came a day when she no longer wanted to hold the past in the palm of her hand.”
“Like the family that lived here?”
“Perhaps—more likely, they all died in one of the plagues that swept through Sanctuary long before you were born, and there was no one left to remember or forget.” Grandfather plucked the green signet from Bec’s hand. “I should remember them. I must have been here, but the memories are gone, washed clean like the sand after the tide. I think I remember a woman-tall, with a slight limp …” He shook his head. His eyes brightened, but he wasn’t looking at Bec. “No. Her family packed everything up and left in Ninety. The last thing they’d have done would have been to empty the reliquary. She’d have carried the box on her lap—
“What was their name? The Monnesi?” Grandfather asked himself questions and answered them. “No, not Monnesi. The Serripines received the Monnesi relics when the last son died. The Tetrites! No … no … Serripines have theirs, too. You should see it, boy—your mother should—the reliquary at Land’s End! It is big enough to bury someone in. Say what you will about Lord Vion Serripines, he honors the ancestors. He’s got the relics of a score of families, treats them the same as he treats