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There is a custom amongst our people that after death, but before the burning, the women who are closest to the deceased meet to wash and prepare the body for the final journey. It is what my dear Maia hoped to do for me when she journeyed to the Mountain to pay that final tribute to whatever scraps of me she could gather together. Ah, Maia! How much easier it would have been for you, to dotingly tend over the bones of your Psyche, to place them ever pliant and ever loving exactly where your grief would have them! Instead you found a living love with loyalties and desires of her own. I could not know what I knew and be who you wanted me to be, my Maia. Yet how long was the road for both of us until that could clearly be seen. We are so very near now. Here we pause, one final time, between the death and the burning. Your body is laid out on the Pillar Room, pale and solemn and unmoving, still in the clothes you were wearing when you collapsed.
The women gather, and unseen I join them. Death is not the end, and Orual is also Psyche. But in this one moment on the road I am myself alone. Soon I will continue on my journey of redemption, but before I turn away from mortality there is this final space to say goodbye. Between the death and the burning. Do the women sense me here? They are gathered warily, Redival, Poobi and Ansit. Does my presence fill the room with holiness and beauty? Or darker hints, the scent of sacrifice and blood? Or does my watching leave no ripples in their minds at all?
Their hair is shorn already. Poobi looks smaller and more childlike than ever without her dark hair. Redival is old now, and fat, but without her golden curls she looks strangely young again. How many times now, this shearing of grief? First for her mother, and then for mine. Later for her father. I was not there to see how they managed her hair for her wedding finery. The curls would have been short and wild, only a month after his burning. How quickly the world must turn when affairs of state crank the handle!
It is Ansit who breaks this trend. Without her hair she looks short and squat, out of time and ageless. Her ample body shorn of her locks is both unfeminine and yet deeply womanly, as though carved of the same timeless immovable rock as Ungit herself.
What mourners you have, my sister! I think you would have said you harboured little love for any of them were you here. Perhaps not Poobi. You took too little notice of her, your kind dark-skinned slave, to dislike her. With the others you warmed yourself on your jealousy, for they had what you had not: your sister with her golden curls, Bardia’s wife with her many children. Poobi you ignored, a silent shadow bringing you food and drink and comfort. Throughout your life you leaned on her constant love, yet your emotions reached only a mild distain and pity. My poor sister! Your veiled life, where you failed so often to see what was so clearly in front of your face.
The women undress your body now, in preparation for washing your corpse. I hear them murmuring to each other, remarking on your condition. You fought your whole life, my sister, honing your mind and your body daily with hours of toil, and your flesh has been sculptured by your struggles. There is no spare inch. Firm muscle and lean sinew, cold and still now in death. Your days of fighting and statecraft have been so different from their work of bearing and raising children, and your body seems alien to them, neither fully female nor fully male.
Poobi removes your undergarments and folds them neatly, yet despite her ability to do this most intimate act of service, she still hesitates at your veil, unable to undo the clasp for this final time. Queen of Glome, how far you went! And if the journey was because you fled yourself, chased at your heels by the demons of your own decisions, we can still marvel at the edifices you built along the way. The bridge over the Shennit, the grand library, the wealth of the silver mines, victory in war and magnanimity in peace. And this blank sheet is the face that did it all, consuming my Maia, hiding all her truth. Blank and lonely and aloof.
I watch the women gaze on where your face would be, lost in their own memories of the Queen of Glome. Your body is pale and vulnerable, shrunken by death. The blank screen of your veil is a strange contrast, indistinguishable from when you were alive. Death has removed none of its power, even now it continues to intimidate and alienate those around it.
It is Ansit who breaks the spell and reaches over and removes it. And there you are, my Maia, my sister. This space is one of paradox, at once so painfully intimate and yet so impossibly distant. All focused on your corpse, both stripped of all power yet magnetically powerful. Between the death and the burning.
It is a space that breaks down boundaries, and the women talk as they wash you. They share their memories, and there is something deep in each otherwise inconsequential tale. It is Redival who first comments on your two great scars, now even more livid against the paleness of your skin in death, and Poobi who shares the first story.
“Why, when she came home with that one on her left arm I wept, I did. What else could you do? Her sister fed to the Gods, and her so terribly sick, and then her sneaking out and staying away overnight, and no knowledge of where she’d gone or if she’d ever return. Pity knows what would have happened to me, a lady’s maid who had lost her lady, there would have been little enough space in the Court for me then. The fields, I guess, or, if they were very angry, the mines. So I kept up the routine every day, hoping that no-one would notice so long as the food was taken to her room at the right time, but with every hour I could feel my doubts growing that she would ever come back. What if the Shadowbrute had developed a taste for her family, and had eaten her as well?”
“I’d never seen a wound like it. The ragged bandage that barely covered it looked as though it had been dragged through a flood, or a mudslide. And the wound once I’d picked the bandage out of it was even uglier, a stab wound so rough it looked like it had been made by one who had never held a knife before, clean through her arm and out the other side.”
“But brave! Never was there anyone as brave as my mistress. There’s many a man who would have fainted or screamed, but she gritted her teeth and almost before the dressing was finished had me fetching her food and drink. If I had ever wondered if our rulers truly are of divine blood, the way she handled herself through that night meant I would never doubt it again. And the speed at which she healed! It was nothing short of miraculous.”
“She never told the tale of how she’d come by it, though. I loved to collect the crumbs of her secrets, sit in corners and let the conversations flow past me and puzzle out what was shaping the course of Glome, but on that one she let nothing slip. Whatever it was, it was then she first started to wear her veil. I thought at first it was to hide if she was in pain unexpectedly from the wound. But then I guess it became a habit, for the wound itself healed so quick and clean that it surely couldn’t still pain her?”
Poobi pauses, and strokes the hair back off your forehead with a gentle tenderness, one final gesture which mirrors the care she lavished on you throughout your life, my Maia.
Ansit spoke into the pause. “I heard the tale of how she got her other scar so many times. Whenever Bardia had drunk too much wine at the palace, he’d come home and dandle Ilerdia on his knee and out would come the same story. Never he mind if it had taken me hours to get the lad down in the first place. Papa must have his audience, and another generation must be trained up to worship the Queen of Glome.” Her eyes drifted off to the long-ago memory.
“ ‘Now, my lad’, he would say, ‘what should you always do?’ And Illie’s eyes would light up, and he’d say ‘If the bush is thick or the ground’s not fair, watch out in case an ambush’s there!’ Ah, boys who have never seen war, how sweet it is to them! Then Bardia would set him gently to face him, and say ‘It was a hot day, and the fighting had been fierce, and we were too keen to make the ground and push forwards. I should have checked more carefully, but…’”
“And Illie would interrupt, as he always did, ‘But you didn’t know it as well as I do, and so you were got by an ambush!’. And Bardia would laugh and say ‘Yes, my little man, you’d have been safe. But there I was, unhorsed and surrounded by thirty enemy soldiers, swords to the right of me, swords to the left of me…’”
“‘And your last thought that you would never see me or Mama again!’”
“‘So I prayed to the great Goddess Ungit, who hears all our prayers…’”
“‘And she sent her spirit down on Queen Orual, who rode down on her horse and went slash slash slash, and killed all thirty of them and sent you straight home to me and Mama!’”
“And Bardia would laugh, that warm deep laugh, and say ‘Well, not quite all thirty of them. Some of her other soldiers helped. And I couldn’t come home straight away, there was a lot more work to do in the war. But she did kill seven men, single handedly.’”
“‘And she took a terrible wound that would have killed any mortal man, but because of the God in her she managed to survive!’”
“And they would sit together, my husband and my son, with the firelight glowing in their eyes, and I’d see that they’d follow her to the ends of the earth and beyond if she asked it, their God-Queen warrior.”
Ansit falls silent, and the three of them rest a while with their own memories, looking at the body but seeing only the past. There is work enough ahead of them for the rest of the night, the rituals of anointing and the preparation of the pyre. There is time to pause now, between the death and the burning.
I cannot pause though. I came here to find my Maia, but she is not here in this shell. It is time to leave these Deadlands, and return to the house of my Lord, and suddenly I am filled with the sure and certain knowledge that when I return my dear Maia will be there. The love that we felt for each other as children under the pear trees will be only a shadow of the love that we will find there. And we will see each other face to face, and I will comfort her, and she will comfort me, and we will be our very selves, wholly present, united with my Lord.