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Wheat stretched around Silas in every direction. It was a modest to mild crop, but in his youthful inexperience it might as well have been many kilometers. The burial plot was much the same. In less than ten years, Silas would be able to stand in such a trench and still have thirty centimeters over the original earth. Today he feared he would never climb out. Every beetle and worm felt like a threat to the precious crop they would be interring at sunset. The shallow aquifer water about his feet reminding him of his father's warnings that two centimeters of water could drown his baby brother, and to never leave a young boy in the baths alone. Then his sire took his hand and pulled him out with ease.
As sunset finally arrived, the field was set alight into a molten ocean of gold. The early autumn wind sweet with the scent of rich earth and the morning's gentle rain. And despite Silas's grief, a sense of peace settled into his soul.
It was a fitting farewell for his father. The only regret was that he could never see it for himself. Then again, Silas pondered, maybe he could. Somewhere, in some other state of existence. It was as if the planet itself was singing of his father's endless love, kindness, and wisdom, and the final sacrifice he made to pass that sweetness on to the next generation.
Silas prayed silently, to his father, to the field, to the haven trees, that he would grow to be at least half as good of a man as his father had been. That maybe not all of the heart ache had been in vain.
Then his little brother gasped and squealed, "He moved! He moved! Ada's not dead!"
Silas's heart fluttered in his chest, a hope rising, more painful and ugly than Silas could ever have expected. Their sire took little Tolui in his arms, "No, no, he's gone. Sometimes bodies twitch a little."
Standing respectfully off to the side, the physician who had been present for Wren's death stepped in. "I'm sorry, lad. The water in the ground and the water in the body meets. Little bits clench and then relax. It's just the way the body returns to soil. It's why we wrap them up."
Silas could still feel the linen under his hands. The water as it soaked into the fibers and inevitably the skin of the hands that would never hold him again. Arms that would for all eternity hold the water and the earth and his baby brother.
He tried not to remember the bed-sheets dark red and smelling of iron, his father's skin once as rich as the earth, becoming so ashen. The last 'I love you' that would now have to last Silas a lifetime.
Mercifully, his father was gone before the baby was cut out. A baby that never cried, and three hours later, he too succumbed to his own under-developed lungs in their sire's arms.
Yet the sun was lowering to rest, as Silas's sire and the physician tried desperately to calm Tolui from his horrid misunderstanding.
A gentle hand rested on Silas's shoulder, and the doulos murmured to him, "There isn't much time. We need to sing, or it won't be done. You remember the words?"
Silas nodded. Even though his throat was tight, he let the doulos guide his voice shaking as he sang a tone that might have been joyful unless one listened closely to the words. A prayer of harvest, about the all ways that which ends fertilize what has yet to begin.