The Enterprise of Death - Jesse Bullington [122]
There were always a few whose spirits had not quit their bones for what other worlds await the dead, perhaps those with unfinished business in the mortal realm, and Awa singled out the three corpses present whose spirits clung to their flesh like a drowning sailor to driftwood. They were still mindless, of course, as the spirits could not actually reenter their old homes without her help, and so help them she did after ordering the rest of the mindless ones to bury each other.
There was a recently deceased man, his skin barely blackened by the grave, and a man and a woman with less skin between them than Awa had on her two thumbs. Once the restored spirits had stopped marveling at the event, all three faced Awa. She would have returned their polite bows had her injuries not crippled her.
“I am in your debt,” said the freshest of the dead. “That monster had dug me up and would have eaten my body as surely as he ate the dozen before me if you had not interrupted him. He would eat one of us, sing his song, and eat another, and I would have been next.”
“Why care?” Awa managed. “You’re dead.”
“He ate them, bones and all, and if he had devoured me I would not have been able to meet you, and ask the boon I shall now beg.”
Awa was accustomed to the dead making little sense to the living, and so she simply nodded.
“My request is a simple one—I promised my heart to the sea, and had no intention of dying, and being buried, anywhere but within her. I was born on the coast, but not long ago life pushed me far from her, and fate has made a liar of me. I beg that you take this heart of mine with you on your travels, and before it rots away to nothing cast it into my beloved.”
“The rest?” Awa said with a wince. “Ribs, say? Legs, say?”
“The rest?” The corpse took a step back. “Well, the rest could just …”
“You can hear as well as I what she thinks, what she needs,” said the woman’s skeleton, both she and the other old corpse having salvaged operative tongues from their mindless neighbors before they had fully reburied themselves.
“Yes,” said the male skeleton, clapping his finger bones on the fresh corpse’s shoulder. “The hyena would’ve eaten you anyway. If it’s only your heart you care about, where’s the harm in helping our mistress?”
“No harm, I suppose.” The dead man smiled nervously at Awa. “Use of me what you will, mistress, though I beg you remove me first so I do not feel it.”
“Come,” said Awa. “Come and rest.”
The dead man knelt as if in prayer before Awa, who still half sat, half leaned on the tombstone. Awa gently pushed his spirit out of his bones, then went to work with her knife. His heart was already well on its way to putrescence, but Awa wagered that with the help of the sun spirits that drifted down even in cruelest winter she could dry it enough to last the duration of a trip to the ocean. She was surprised to see that the man’s spirit had not drifted away to wherever they went, nor had it stayed in his skull, but had somehow come loose and settled in the wet lump of muscle Awa held in her hand.
“Mistress?” the male skeleton said quietly but firmly, shifting from one foot to the other as though he were a child in bad need of a piss. “Ah, mistress? Mistresssss?”
“Yes?” Awa was intent on her task, wrapping the dead man’s heart in the wet rags rotting to his skin.
“Ah, lights? Lights.”
“What?” Awa looked up.
“The village is coming,” the female skeleton said. “Let us away.”
“But I haven’t heard your requests yet,” said Awa. “How will I know—”
“Let us away,” the dead woman repeated. “Hurry.”
“Right,