Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (essential reading txt) 📕

is goggle at the picture-hided witch-man and his river-raddled daughter both.

‘What is she doing here?’ This is the best that may be squeezed out past my lips, set tight and bloodless as a rein upon the terror welling in me.

Olun looks down at the cold, still girl beside him with surprise, as if he but this moment notices she’s there, then he looks back at me.

‘Her? It’s our custom to inspect the unknown dead for marks of plague or other signs before they’re put to rest. This is accomplished at the roundhouse in the usual way of things, but being sickened by my burn it is not in me to be moved that far, so Bern and Buri bring her here. Sit down and watch. Remember that upon my death, these duties pass to you, with many more beside.’

What is for me to do but kneel as he directs me? Both the rough-boys bare their sundered smile at me as Olun turns once more to his inspection of the girl. My smile is faltering in reply.

Closing his good eye, Olun now regards the dead thing with his blind and frosted orb alone. One brittle, painted claw creeps out to crawl across her belly, cold as polished stone. It kneads and probes her flaccid breasts, then scuttles further, past the stripe of green about her neck, to linger at the caked lips of the gash below her jaw. One finger traces this along its length and then moves up to rootle through the hole gnawed in her cheek, and to caress the tube-shot scab of red where once her ear is joined. A shudder passes through me when he speaks, although it is not cold considering the season.

‘She is pulled from out the river one day since. She is perhaps another day afloat before she’s found, and so is killed not far up river north of here. Her throat is opened by a dagger or a short-blade knife, both sharp and hard enough to cut through bone, as in her thumb.’

Though they may see me staring hard away from them, the brothers Bern and Buri now both speak to me in turn, and force me to look up.

‘It seems to me she dies the day that you arrive.’ These words are spoken by the brother on the left. His voice is slow and drawling, filled with strange amusement, though he does not smile or crease his eyes as he squats there regarding me across the slaughtered woman.

‘From the north. Arrive here from the north, the same as her.’

This is the other brother speaking, though in voice and manner they are both alike as in their looks. What do they wish for me to say?

The left-most brother speaks again. ‘Do you hear anything of robbers in the passes while you are upon the track?’

Half-drowning in my fright of what they may suspect, this notion is a welcome raft to clutch at.

‘Robbers? Why, you may be sure of it! The travellers that meet with me these last few days upon the track all talk of nothing else. A great fierce band of men, they say, though speaking for myself it seems the cut-bags do not show themselves to me. My way here is without event.’

Both brothers purse their lips at once and then nod thoughtfully.

‘A band of robbers?’ says the one upon the right. ‘It may be so. Such things are known to us. You’re lucky that you do not meet with them yourself.’

‘Aye,’ adds the brother on the left, ‘considering that you must be not much more than a league or so away when she is murdered. Very lucky.’

All of us nod gravely here, acknowledging my fortune, and let Olun carry on with his investigation.

Still with nothing but his blind eye visible the old man shifts his hand back down the woman’s drift-meat belly to explore the curl-ferned mount there at her fork. His knowing fingers sort amongs the coils and ringlets, moving them aside to better see the cold white hillock whence this overgrowth is sprung.

‘There are no bruises.’ Here, the old man clucks his tongue in disappointment and a sudden chill falls over me: he does not move aside the hair to look before he shuts his sighted eye. How may he know a bruise is there or not by touch alone? The hand moves further down now. Fingers struggling like blind-worms crowd in, eager for admission to her rigor-narrowed aperture, and yet without avail. The frail and painted hand withdraws. The witch-man speaks.

‘Her gill-caul is unbroken.’

Here the rough-boys both look up at Olun with the same frown drawing tight their shaven brows.

‘She is not shanked by force, then?’ Buri says, or Bern.

‘There’s queer now,’ Bern comes back, or Buri. ‘She’s a comely girl and if she’s to be robbed and killed then why not shank her first?’

He does not need to add ‘That’s what we’d do,’ for it is in his eyes. Instead, his frown grows deep and, after thinking for a little while, he ventures now his next remark. ‘Does she have pox?’

The old man shakes his head so that the stars designed thereon swoop wildly from their course.

‘No pox. No mark of plague. She’s safe to bury.’ Here he turns his face to me, and shows me all the pain and fatal weakness graven in its lines. The old man’s nearer to his death than is my guess before today, and he does not yet tell me of his tunnels or his treasure holes.

‘Usin?’ he says now. ‘We are finished here. You may as well go take your feast with Hurna while we ready this poor child for burial.’

Though Hurna is not any favoured company of mine, it does not grieve me much to do as Olun says, so great is my relief to be away from these same-seeming brothers and the corpse they peck about so thoroughly. It’s bittering scent is all about me, walking from the hut to where the dour, god-muddled woman crouches by