4 - Bernard Cornwell by Stormchild (pdf)

Author:Stormchild (pdf) [Ismeretlen]
Language: hun
Format: epub

The torlike stones barred my path westward. I rested for a time at their base, sitting with my back against the rocks and staring at the Desolate Straits, which were now so far beneath me that low clouds, wispy and gray, broke my view of the wind-fretted water.

344 / STORMCHILD

At last, fighting the temptation to remain in the small shelter of the high rock wall, I tried to go around it, but a steep slope of scree fell away to the north just as it did to the south, so, moving like a somnambulant creature in a nightmare, I clambered slowly up to where the wind and the rain shrieked their cacophony across the tor’s summit. The climb was simple, yet as my head poked over the crest the force of the wind almost stole my breath away. I dragged myself over the edge, banging the rifle’s butt on the rock as I clumsily moved, and then I went utterly still.

For a second I thought I was dreaming. Then, for another second, I hoped I was dreaming. Then I retched emptily.

A body lay in a cup of the rock.

For a few seconds, for a few whirling seconds of madness, I thought the body was Nicole’s, then I saw that this woman had hair as black as the feathers of the bird of prey that had screamed at me on the lower slope.

It was that black hair, which was long and gleaming from the rain, that told me this corpse was that of a woman, because her flesh had been stripped by scavenging birds and animals. The carrion eaters had left some sinews between the yellowing joints, but otherwise she was nothing more than discolored bones in a bleak place. She had been flensed.

I fell to my knees. My sore belly heaved with a last lunge of sour vomit. I wanted to weep, but instead I shuffled forward and made myself examine the skelet-on.

Bernard Cornwell / 345

There was a ring on one bone finger. I did not touch it. There was also a necklace, which I similarly left alone. The woman’s clothes had either been torn by carrion eaters or else had decayed in the weather, for her sweater and jeans were now nothing but faded and threadbare scraps that clung to her yellow bones. The only undecayed object in that high place was a common sack that was still hooked into the bony grip of her dead skeletal hands. One of her leg bones was broken, suggesting she had been unable to reach the shelter of the mine, and instead had died of exposure in this high, bleak place.

I pulled the sack out of her dead grip, making her bones rattle as the frail cloth came free. The first thing I found inside the sack was a blue Australian passport, in which was written the dead woman’s name, Maureen Delaney, and her age, twenty-three. The passport photograph showed a round, girlish face that smiled at the world with an astonished happiness.

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