A Gathering of Ghosts by Karen Maitland

Author:Karen Maitland [Maitland, Karen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472235893
Publisher: Headline
Published: 2018-09-05T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 33

Sorrel

Morwen did not explain what she would do – perhaps there weren’t names for such things. I watched her groping along a dark, rocky ledge. Her hands closed around a lump on the craggy shelf, as though she was gathering it out of the rock and pressing it in her fingers, like a child moulds a snowball from a drift of snow. As she lifted it, I saw that it was a roughly hewn bowl stuffed with fat-soaked dry moss, fashioned from the same grey stone as the rock on which it had stood.

She set it down near the cloth-covered ledge at the far end of the cave that I’d noticed when she’d first brought me into Fire Tor. She pulled a burning stick from the fire and lowered it towards the bowl. Tiny scarlet sparks flashed across the moss, like a flock of coloured birds taking flight from the moors, then a flame shot upward growing in strength and height until it was the silky yellow of a buttercup.

Morwen turned, holding out her hand to me. I stumbled to her side across the uneven floor, sick with apprehension. She pulled me down so I was kneeling beside her. Then, grasping the edge of the white woollen cloth, she tugged it aside. I had to stifle a cry. The light from the bowl of burning moss flickered across the corpse of a man stretched out on the slab, but it could not penetrate the black hole in his throat. In those first few moments, I barely noticed his nakedness, or the blondness of his hair, or the withered lips drawn back over yellowed teeth. It was the wound that held my gaze. It seemed to yawn wider and wider as I stared at it, a gaping mouth stretching to devour me.

Had the body been lying there last time Morwen had brought me into the cave? Had I been sitting next to a corpse and not known it? I’d realised that something lay beneath the cloth, but I’d never thought . . .

There was no stench of decay, only of herbs and a bitter-sweet smell lingering about his hair. He was like the dead cat Mam dried in the smoke when I was a bairn and hung from the rafters to keep us all safe from sickness.

‘Who is he?’ I whispered.

Morwen lightly touched a bracelet of thorns that had been bound about his wrist. The nails on his hand were long and smooth, almost as black and shiny as the pebble that lay on his forehead. ‘Ankow – he collects the souls of the dead.’

I knew what Ankow was condemned to do. But I’d never dreamed I’d see his face, not till he came to take me. Mam used to say his head could turn right round, like an owl’s, so no soul could hide from him. But she said only the dying ever saw his face when he threw back his hood and reached out his hand to seize them.

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