The wailing of the women of the Temple told the tale. The cries of the tired, the weak, the beaten by life who lived within the estate of the Hill family was repeated in every crypt, grave, and green where a woman resided. It was a cry that had been heard in the valley since time immemorial, before the children of the valley were ousted by the grave leavers, long before the current residents took away the land from those whose dead lay beneath the keening.
If anything the Lady Leech could say that Posy passed into the land of her mother’s peacefully. The women of the river, last of the gravediggers, said the Lady greeted Her children as their ashes fell into Her holy embrace, and a mother who died on her childbed would be reborn as one of the silvery beasts that lavished themselves in the water and followed rafts and boats as they took their way downriver. If these crying women had their way they would burn the girl whole, and she would be forgotten into the waters.
And so the two women of another land, once friends and now cold acquaintances bound by the life and death of a girl they had both loved spoke in their own tongue as the death cries rang.
“What is your decision, Naset? Do we give her to her father’s gods or to the gods of her mother’s heart?” the Lady asked calmly, washing the body beside the Lady Hill and using her secret name.
“The people of the valley, they do not respect our ways and gods. Sure, you keep to your Queen of the Reeds, and others may speak to the Potter or the birthing moon, but when have you danced the hsithantha with others to celebrate a victory against the snake? When have you burned the cakes and wine for one of your girls giving her body to a man?” Squab Hill, Naset, wept into the crook of her arm. “This place pollutes the mind, hardens our souls. I don’t believe our gods can hear us from so far away, sister.”
Leech, once known as Hsith, kept her council as they continued their task. She performed the traditions of the valley folk, sealing the doors and windows from the soul escaping before its release in fire, the weighing of the eyes with a set of river stones to bind the spirit further to its vessel. The meat cooled and moved, little motions of the body tightening as they brought the body into the tucked position of the blessed child returning to her Mother.
A mother to be burned, and so the line of Alonkahsith dies on this broken shore. A cursed womb and a cursed birthing, no woman will sing the songs of the land. Here is the land where even the Mother’s priests are men, who cast their eyes upon our gods and goddesses in the lust of conquest. Hsith placed a stone in the girl’s hands, kissing the cooling cheek as they wrapped the fine muslin.
“I had bought this from a trader, you know. My shroud, used on my only daughter. Was that my curse? To bring the cloth of the dead into the house of the living?” Naset looked for validation, her words begging for any answer that made her thoughts sacrilege.
“She had a turned birth. The child will live, and you’ll need a nurse for him to thrive. He has all of his fingers and toes, and the screaming? He’ll be a trouble for you until you end up in your own cloth.”
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
The cries stopped, women woken from their dead slumber would be standing outside. They would bring whatever meager gifts they have to burn for the late Posy Hill, and give the girl their pride. It was a sorority that women paid their gifts in hope of never belonging to it; the sisterhood of the bleeding bed. They warded away the pain and suffering with charms and chants, some burned dung or skins covered in the writings of mystics to keep the serpent away. In the end too many would see that cruel face strike as they lay at their most vulnerable.
“I will not display the body. It is a barbaric practice for these people. I will go to accept gifts, as it is my right and it keeps the peace.” the Lady Hill grabbed at her sore back and sighed. “However, if an aunt who is foolish to the ways of this place were to speak the words and do the deeds I would not turn her away.”
The tears told Hsith that this was the most she would get. The Lady Hill left the room with her head hanging low, the proper posture of grief. And the Lady Leech began the work, knowing there was not much time. She took up the candles, a clump of the girl’s hair, a bit of her blood and the sheets of her deathbed. With these she would bind the spirit of her sister, her daughter, her child to carry with her until she could bury it at the true temple of her goddess.
Naset was to be the priestess. She had spent her time at the temple, learned her letters and the secrets. I know only the words of the goddess who failed me, the goddess whose works I have failed tonight. May I perform the task before me, and give this daughter of our land peace.
It was a simple prescription, she thought as she wove the hair and melted the wax above the incense burner. Blood for life, hair for form. In their homeland they would bring the dying to the sands and the blood would fill, but Leech hoped that sand and linen could be interchanged. The priestesses would know, but she had to make this right.
The wax melted, and the thin strips of linen mixed. She sang the song of Posy, of Squab Hill, of the girl who had been called Naset, born with the name of a warrior queen whose sister had been Hsith, the lesser daughters of Alonkahsith, sent abroad with three of their friends with a tutor and his wife to learn the ways of the valley folk. She sang of the day the tutor’s wife had passed, and the tutor, wanting nothing more to do with the land of her birth, had sold them one by one to people. She sang the secrets, the abuses and triumphs, fears and pride of those daughters of sand and sea, how Naset had been forced to her name of Squab by the fat Lord Hill. Of the battles of the Barrow that made her father’s name, and the great feast her mother had made to lull the Lord into taking poison and giving over the keys of his graveyard kingdom. She even told of the making of that poison, by the hands of a girl then known as Serpent, and the two women swearing to never tell another living soul.
The Lady Leech sang the secrets of her generation and those that came before to the meat and wax before her, shaping the effigy. In the end it did not show the true artistry that she had seen in their land; no gravekeeper would paint such a symbol to appear as the dead had in life, nor would they make a bronze case for it. The priests of this place frowned upon old practices, and she hoped only that her sister had the foresight to procure such a work on the sly. The last words she had heard recited twice; once for her grandfather, and another for the boy who had first kissed her, killed in a silly duel that led her to want to take up an offer to run away.
“And this is the breath of you, the life that you leave. Here now, so charmed, your spirit shall lie. A thousand thousand years, in time a grain of sand, shall you be so bound until your soul can rise to meet those of your people in the lands of their birth. In this I pray, and give you peace to sleep.” The Lady Leech, once Hsith Alon, placed the effigy on the chest of her soon burned niece. And if the hard woman wept in silence it is not for our eyes to see her do it.
