The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [147]
‘I suppose it was buried with Nevyn,’ he remarked to Branna.
‘I think it was,’ Branna said. ‘He didn’t want grave goods, but Jill couldn’t stand it, just dumping him into a bare grave.’
They were up in their chamber. Branna was sitting on the floor, reading by the light of two candles set on her dower chest, and Neb was scrubbing his dirty hands in the washbasin by the window. He used up their scrap of soap before he got them clean enough to satisfy him.
‘I don’t understand why you’re working so hard in the garden,’ Branna said. ‘One of the servants could do the digging for you.’
‘Oh, I’ve got to do somewhat to fill my time. You spend most of your days with your cousin and the children, after all.’
‘Do you want me to stop?’ She sounded alarmed.
‘What? I don’t, truly. They need you, just as the garden needs me.’ Neb was concentrating on rinsing his hands. ‘Besides, I don’t want to eat at the tieryn’s table without earning my keep. Being your husband is a joy, not gainful labour.’
She laughed, pleased, or so she sounded. He shook his hands dry, then turned to smile at her. For the briefest of moments she looked like a stranger. He was expecting Jill, who was taller, thinner, her hair heavily streaked with grey. Why weren’t they sitting together in their home deep within Brin Toraedic, laughing at the antics of the Wildfolk? Then he remembered when and who he was.
Those moments, when the past would take over his consciousness, happened regularly enough that they’d stopped frightening him. Working in the garden, the regular rhythms of physical labour, the heat of the sun, the smell of the herbs—they all combined to thin the barrier in the mind that separates conscious awareness from deep memories and dreams. While he worked, he also would meditate upon the figure of the raven mazrak, as Salamander had suggested. This he found difficult. His mind kept wandering, or so he thought of it at first. The image of the young priest who’d escorted him and Clae down the Great West Road after the death of their parents kept rising in his mind and spoiling the meditation.
‘I don’t understand it,’ Neb told Branna one evening. ‘I don’t think about that priest when I’m doing anything else, just when I’m trying to concentrate on the wretched mazrak.’
‘Well, maybe that’s a clue,’ Branna said.
‘Maybe he’s connected in some way with the mazrak, you mean?’
‘Just that. You told me about that head priest in the northern temple, the one whose cows Arzosah stole. Didn’t he know a little dweomer? And didn’t you and Dalla wonder who taught him?’
‘Ye gods.’ Neb felt like an utter fool. ‘Of course he did. And truly, this fellow—he said his name was Tirn—didn’t strike me as your usual priest of Bel. He had quite an eye for the lasses, for one thing, and then there were the tattoos.’
‘Tattoos? I’ve never heard of a priest of Bel having tattoos.’
‘Exactly my point, my love. These were blue and all over his face, and down his neck as far as I could see, too. He told me that they covered scars from burns he’d got as a child.’
‘Could you see scars under them?’
‘I never really looked. My mother had just died, and I wasn’t thinking very clearly.’
‘My poor love! You’ve suffered so much.’
‘So did half the people in Trev Hael. I’ve no reason to pity myself.’ Neb shrugged with a shake of his head to banish the grief. ‘But those tattoos—they looked like writing. Ye gods! I didn’t realize it then, but they looked like characters from the Westfolk syllabary. Meranaldar wrote it out for me during the siege of Honelg’s dun, you see, just to pass the time.’
‘Now that’s significant.’ Branna spoke slowly, thinking. ‘Ask Mirryn, will you? It’s a thing he told me a long time ago.’
(Continued)
Lord Mirryn did indeed know the meaning of tattoos that featured Westfolk letters. ‘Horsekin,’ he said. ‘The Horsekin put those