Deep Water (49 page)

Next to her, another woman, older, turned and put an arm across her shoulders. “Now, now, Piper,” she scolded gently. “He’s
safe now. They’ve let the boat go.”

“I’ll never see him again, Snapper!” Piper wept.

“Better that than seeing him as a corpse,” Snapper replied. “At least you know he’s safe. Him and the other young ones. You’ve
still got this little lady, Searose, to look after, remember. That tall one with the golden hair said we had until sunset
to bury our dead and get out of the town. Lucky to get that much time, I reckon.” She put her hands out to the baby and the
baby launched herself happily into her arms.

“Your son is safe on the boat,” Snapper said. “Time to deal with the dead.”

That quietened Piper, which Bramble was glad of — and then realized that preferring to deal with dead bodies rather than living
emotions showed how many dead bodies she’d seen lately. She was getting used to it. She wondered how much more used to it
Acton’s men were. After all, she merely dipped into their lives, while they kept fighting when she was not observing. Perhaps
they were so used to it that death didn’t even mark them anymore. Perhaps they just didn’t notice it. Was that true of Acton?

That was a disquieting thought, and she pushed it away and made herself concentrate on Piper as she and the crowd of women
who had watched the boat leave walked slowly away from the harbor, up the hill which cupped Turvite. This wasn’t the place
of Bramble’s imaginings.

Where was the great and glorious city of Acton’s triumph? The songs all talked about Turvite’s magnificence — except that
really old one, that just talked about the ghosts. There was no magnificence here. Turvite was barely more than a village.
Bigger than her home village of Wooding, admittedly, but not by much, and different from it mainly in the number of trees
that grew among the houses.

Down by the harbor there were no docks. The boats — small fishing smacks with a single mast — had been drawn up on the narrow
shingle beach. There were some timber houses, some huts, a few shanties close to the beach, but no large buildings and seemingly
no center to the town.

Piper and Snapper and the other women walked through an open space surrounded by oak trees. Trees that must have been carefully
tended to grow here, in the path of the salt sea breezes. Bramble felt the call of the gods in her mind. The women dipped
their heads to an altar in casual familiarity, although one at the back of the group spat on the ground as she passed.

“What shagging good are they?” she asked angrily, when the other women looked askance. “Didn’t keep our men alive, did they?”

“Not their job, Crab,” Snapper said. Bramble felt the attention of the gods center on Snapper approvingly. “People die,” she
continued. “Everyone dies. What do they care then? Months and years don’t make any difference to them. Their job is to make
sure that rebirth happens. That life continues.”

“Easy enough to say,” Crab snarled, and then pushed past them and strode up the hill. The women watched her go.

“She’s carrying,” a thin, older woman said. “And she’s lost husband and brother and father this day.”

“So have we all.” Snapper sighed.

They kept walking, passing through the screen of oak trees back into the main street of the town. Some of the women were weeping
quietly, others had set faces. Some had the blank look of shock, and were shepherded along by others. Halfway up the hill,
a door opened and a woman came out. Dark-haired, of course, and a bit stout, maybe fifty or more. A woman who moved as if
surety of her own competence was so deep that she couldn’t imagine failing at anything. She had a knife in one hand; a black
stone knife that she gripped as if she would never let it go.

“Tern!” Snapper said gladly.

Piper’s heart gave an odd kick as she looked at Tern, as though frightened. But she came forward with the other women, murmuring
greetings. Bramble noted that they kept a clear space between themselves and Tern. There were no embraces, no shared consolation
with this woman.

Tern raked them all with a glance and moved up the hill, walking briskly. “Come!” she said. “It’s time to take back what is
ours.”

Ah, Bramble thought, the enchanter who raised the dead. Good. I’ve been hoping for this.

The hill was steeper than it looked and Snapper had to hand the baby back to Piper. Piper began puffing as they climbed higher
and the baby thought it was a game. Every time Piper forced out a breath, the baby laughed. Instead of making Piper happier,
each laugh brought her closer to tears.

“Searose doesn’t know what trouble we’re in,” Piper gasped to Snapper as they reached the top of the hill and started down
the other side.

Snapper smiled grimly. “As it should be. Pray to the gods that she keeps unknowing.”

Just over the ridge there was a haphazard pile of bodies. There had been no attempt to lay them out. They sprawled, with limbs
askew. Blood was turning brown on their clothes and skin. A couple of severed arms had been tossed on top of the pile, like
an afterthought. The smell, of pierced gut and vomit and blood and old urine, was horrible. Crab stood there, staring. Piper
gagged, and then ran forward, pushing past Tern to reach one of the bodies, whose face could barely be seen under another
man.

She pushed the body on top away and wailed, “Salmon,” as she took the corpse’s head in one hand. The other still gripped Searose
fiercely. Grief rose up in her like vomit, unstoppable, and Bramble was shaken by the strength of it — true grief, untainted
by fear for her own future or by anger or confusion. Pure as snowmelt, hot as fire. It seared Piper into scalding tears and
Bramble found it almost unbearable. The strength of it brought back all her own grief, every grief she had ever felt, but
particularly the newest one, for Maryrose. She almost envied Piper’s ability to let it loose; to surrender to it as to a huge
wave.

Around her, other women were discovering the bodies of their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons. Sobbing, wailing, choking
tears, swearing, praying… Bramble felt breathless under the onslaught.

Then Tern touched Piper on the shoulder. “Sister,” she said, “hold your tears. Wait, and watch, and listen.”

She drew Piper up and passed her back to Snapper, who held her while Piper blinked at Tern in confusion. The other women moved
away also, as though afraid of Tern.

As she passed, Tern looked closely at each woman. Bramble hurriedly drew her attention back from Piper’s mind, trying to make
herself invisible to the enchantress. Another encounter like the one with Dotta would be too unsettling. Something in her
didn’t want to be seen by Tern, whom she was rapidly coming to dislike, perhaps because, although she looked again and again
into the eyes of women distraught with grief and fear, she showed no sign of compassion.

Tern stopped at last when she reached the woman who had spat at the altar. “You,” she said. “Crab, isn’t it? I need you. I
need your anger. Will you give it?”

“What do I get for it?” Crab asked.

“Revenge.”

Crab nodded decisively, and Tern smiled. Bramble thought, that’s what we’re fighting. That look. That’s the look the enchanter
Saker must have, just before he kills. The look that thirsts for blood. Yet, when I was a child and Granda told me the story
of the enchantress of Turvite, I thought she was a hero. She felt a great sadness that was separate from her share of Piper’s
grief; the same kind of sadness that she had felt the first time she had realized that her father was not the strongest, wisest
man in the world; that her mother was not the best woman in the village. The sadness of reality intruding on a dream. Of certainties
melting.

Tern stood by the bodies, the women in a semi-circle watching her. She held the knife high, and began to speak.

“Gods of field and stream, hear your daughter. Gods of fire and storm, hear your daughter. Gods of earth and stone, hear your
daughter.” Bramble knew this incantation. For the first time since she had understood that the gods were translating for her,
she was sharply aware of the doubling of meaning, because these were words that she knew. She heard them in both languages,
her own and Tern’s.

“Gods of sky and wind, hear your daughter,” Tern said. She took Crab’s hand in her free one and held tightly. Crab became
pale, but she kept her expression of anger and determination. Tern continued to ask the gods for something, but for the first
time, the gods failed to translate. It was as though they didn’t want Bramble to hear these words, to understand them. Bramble
tried frantically to remember, but the words were too alien to her — and to everyone else, she realized, because Snapper was
staring in puzzlement. Bramble caught a sound here and there, but understood nothing and was as surprised as Piper when Tern
raised the black rock knife and cut her hand open, swinging her arm wide so that the drops of blood fell on all the corpses.

The ghosts rose, stepping up from their bodies to stand unsteadily, confused, next to them. They had died clutching their
weapons, so they had them in death: a few swords, some cleavers, mostly hunting spears. They were far clearer to see than
any ghost Bramble had ever witnessed quicken. She couldn’t see through them. They were solid. Real.

Bramble felt Piper’s throat clench, her whole body tense, as Salmon rose and looked around, and saw her. The upsurge of love
that poured through her was overwhelming. It shook Bramble. Salmon was an ordinary man, medium height, plain face, pockmarks.
He held a sword, and his throat was cut through, the dark gash showing horribly. His eyes were kind, though, and it was in
his eyes that Piper searched for something; whatever it was, she found it, because she relaxed and sighed a long, tremulous
sigh.

Salmon started to move toward Piper, but Tern waved him back. “You are dead,” she said. “I have raised your ghosts to take
your city back from the invaders. You cannot die again, but they can. Follow me. Destroy them, and your wives and children
can still be safe.”

Salmon reached out a white hand and tried to touch her, but his hand went right through. Tern didn’t even shiver, and that
was when Bramble knew she was mad. She remembered that feeling, and only someone living completely inside the world in their
head could stay unaffected by it.

Salmon looked at his hand in puzzlement, looking questioningly at Tern. “I will give you strength,” she reassured him. “My
death will give you bodies to fight with.”

The other ghosts were raising clenched fists in the air, shouting words of defiance that no one could hear. Their wounds showed
up clearly; some were missing arms, others had guts hanging out of their bellies.

Salmon nodded, then looked across at Piper and smiled, or tried to. His face was full of difficult and deep emotion, and Bramble
understood that the same torrent of love was pouring through him. For the first time, she envied another woman. To feel so
strongly, and be matched in that feeling… Well, she could let that dream go, too. A demon who had stolen a human body
had told her that, at an inn in Sandalwood. Thee wilt love no human never, he had said, and she thought she had accepted it.
Must accept it. But it was hard, even though she knew that love had brought the great grief she felt still pulsing through
Piper. The baby shifted in Piper’s arms and Salmon’s eyes went to it and grew soft. Their love had brought Piper the baby
and that, too, was no small thing.

Motherhood was not something Bramble had yearned for, but she was no stranger to the appeal of looking after something small
and soft and vulnerable — she had nursed too many poddy calves and kids not to understand. Piper looked at Searose and truly
saw her for the first time since the vigil on the beach. Bramble felt her fill immediately with a complex intertwining of
emotions: a softer, warmer kind of love, pity, grief for the father Searose would never know, and a great, bone-shaking fear
that the baby would die, too. Which wasn’t unreasonable, Bramble thought, remembering River Bluff and the children who died
there.

Around them, women were going up to the men they had loved, saying things to them in low voices, the things they hadn’t had
a chance to say before they died. At least Tern had given them that. All the women seemed to care so much that Bramble wondered
for a moment whether there were no unhappy marriages in Turvite. But as Tern led the ghosts up over the hill and down through
the town, followed proudly by Crab and then the other women and children, she realized that the women who did not care were
busy packing their belongings, getting ready to leave. Handcarts stood outside many houses, bags were ready in doorways, women
were ordering children to gather what they could. Only the truly grieving had gone to bury the dead.

As the ghosts went by, the women came out of their houses, snatched their children back from the procession, made the sign
against evil and then, as though enchanted themselves, fell in behind the other women and followed. They marched silently
up the hill that led to the cliff. Some women walked beside their men, others behind.

Acton saw them coming. Although his men had taken barrels of beer and were drinking freely, he had still set lookouts. He
was standing a little way off, talking to — arguing with — Asgarn. Baluch stood nearby, listening. Seeing Baluch gave Bramble
a strange feeling — as though he should be aware of her. She knew him well enough by now to tell that he wasn’t happy with
whatever Asgarn was saying. She had felt that particular frown often enough. When the lookout called, the three men turned
as one and suddenly had swords in their hands, glinting in the midday sun.

At first there were shouts and alarms as Acton called his men to order. They sprang up a little unsteadily from where they
had been sprawled, but Bramble saw that they were not really drunk, just a bit merry. They were certainly sober enough to
kill. They clutched their swords and presented their shields, although they clearly weren’t sure what was happening.