Marcus Sedgwick by The Dark Horse

Author:The Dark Horse
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-05-31T11:31:49+00:00

Part Two

THE DARK HORSE

1

To accord Horn the honor due him as Lawspeaker, we left his body on the hillside for the crows to eat.

My father was not so lucky—we buried his body under a single slab of rock on the low hills behind the village.

The death of a Lawspeaker is never a simple matter, but things were more complicated than normal. There was no obvious successor to Horn, just as there hadn’t been when he and my father fought. The difference was that no one really wanted the job this time. No man, that is.

But before the tribe could even think of these things, there was the business of the departing dead to see to.

We took Horn’s body on a wooden stretcher to the circle of rock fingers on the hill above the bay, known as Bird Rock. Everyone went, as is the law. Even Gudrun managed to walk up the hill—her first journey outside the village since her accident.

Mouse walked next to me. I remember she was silent, so silent. Perhaps I should have realized then that something serious had changed in her. Something had happened to her when Ragnald had … what? I’m still not sure what he did to her, but he had changed her somehow.

She had never been loud, but now she was quieter than ever. If it had been possible, I would have said she was even quieter than when she first came to us. But I did not realize this fully, my mind empty; I felt little. It was all a dream to me, just as it seems to me now, looking back after all these years.

I suppose something of me died with my father. That seems likely, doesn’t it? Maybe that was why I felt nothing as we walked up the cold hillside.

But Sif cried. I remember that well. I remember being a little surprised by it. I should not have been.

We put Horn’s body on the stone table in the center of the circle, and Gudrun said some words. I do not remember them.

Then Longshank spoke.

“This place is now sacrosanct. It is forbidden to return to Bird Rock until the new Lawspeaker, whoever he may be, returns to light the bone fire.”

Not that anyone ever went up there anyway, except Gudrun, and, I think, Mouse.

Then we left Horn on Bird Rock for the crows to come and clean his bones.

I was not sorry to leave, for my mother and I had our own duties to perform before the day was done.

Once we were back in the village, my mother, keeping her dignity as well as she could, asked two or three of the men to help us. I didn’t really notice who.

We carried Olaf out to the low hill where we buried people. We dug a shallow trench; it was only a foot or two to the bedrock, and then we put Father into the hole. On top we laid the biggest slab of rock we could move, so that people would know there was someone buried underneath.

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