Читать книгу Pilgrim - Sara Douglass - Страница 7

The bones had lain there for almost twenty years, picked clean by scavengers and the passing winds of time. They had been a neat pile when the tired old soul had lain down for the final time; now they were scattered over a half-dozen paces, some resting in the glare of the sun, others piled under the gloom of a thorn bush.

Footsteps disturbed the peace of the grave site. A tall and willowy woman, dressed in a clinging pale grey robe. Iron-grey hair, streaked with silver, cascaded down her back. On the ring finger of her left hand she wore a circle of stars. She had very deep blue eyes and a red mouth, with blood trailing from one corner and down her chin.

As she neared the largest pile of bones the woman crouched, and snarled, her hands tensed into tight claws.

“Fool way to die!” she hissed. “Alone and forgotten! Did you think I forgot? Did you think to escape me so easily?”

She snarled again, and grabbed a portion of the rib cage, flinging it behind her. She snatched at another bone, and threw that with the ribs. She scurried a little further away, reached under the thorn bush and hauled out its desiccated treasury of bones, also throwing them on the pile.

She continued to snap and snarl, as if she had the rabid fever of wild dogs, scurrying from spot to spot, picking up a knuckle here, a vertebrae there, a cracked femur bone from somewhere else.

The pile of bones grew.

“I want to hunt,” she whispered, “and yet what must I do? Find your useless framework, and knit something out of it! Why must I be left to do it all?”

She finally stood, surveying the skeletal pile before her. “Something is missing,” she mumbled, and swept her hands back through her hair, combing it out of her eyes.

Her tongue had long since licked clean the tasty morsel draining down her chin.

“Missing,” she continued to mumble, wandering in circles about the desolate site. “Missing … where … where … ah!”

She snatched at a long white hair that clung to the outer reaches of the thorn bush and hurried back to the pile of bones with it. She carefully laid it across the top.

Then she stood back, standing very still, her dark blue eyes staring at the bones.

Very slowly she raised her left hand, and the circle of light about its ring finger flared.

“Of what use is bone to me?” she whispered. “I need flesh!”

She dropped her hand, and the light flared from ring to bones.

The pile burst into flame.

Without fear the woman stepped close and reached into the conflagration with both hands. She grabbed hold of something, grunted with effort, then finally, gradually, hauled it free.

Her own shape changed slightly during her efforts, as if her muscles had to rearrange themselves to manage to drag the large object free of the fire, and in the flickering light she seemed something far larger and bulkier than human, and more dangerous. Yet when she finally stood straight again, she had regained her womanly features.

She looked happily at the result of her endeavour. Her magic had not dimmed in these past hours! But she shook her head slightly. Look what had become of him!

He stood, limbs akimbo, pot belly drooping, and he returned her scrutiny blankly, no gratitude in his face at all.

“You are of this land,” she said, “and there is still service it demands of you. Go south, and wait.”

He stared, unblinking, uncaring, and then he gave a mighty yawn. The languor of death had not yet left him, and all he wanted to do was to sleep.

“Oh!” she said, irritated. “Go!”

She waved her hand again, the light flared, and when it had died, she stood alone in the stony gully of the Urqhart Hills.

Grinning again at the pleasantness of solitude, she turned and ran for the north, and as she did so her shape changed, and her limbs loped, and her tongue hung red from her mouth, and she felt the need to sink her teeth into the back of prey, very, very soon.

Scrawny limbs trembling, pot belly hanging from gaunt ribs, he stood on the plain just north of the Rhaetian Hills.

Beside him the Nordra roared.

He was desperate for sleep, and so he hung his head, and he dreamed.

He dreamed. He dreamed of days so far distant he did not know if they were memory or myth. He dreamed of great battles, defeats and victories both, and he dreamed of the one who had loved him, and who he’d loved beyond expression. Then he’d been crippled, and the one who loved him had shown him the door, and so he’d wandered disconsolate — save for the odd loving the boy showed him — until his life had trickled to a conclusion in blessed, blessed death.

Then why was he back?