Page 139 of Circle of Days

She was not breathing.

He knelt beside her and touched her. She was cold.

Poor old Naro. The children would weep.

She must have got up in the night, he supposed, with nobody noticing, and then wandered, perhaps being confused. And for some reason she had fallen down and died. That was the only explanation he could think of for her body being out here, untended.

The villagers would still be asleep. He would take her body to them and rouse them. He bent down and picked her up. She was a thin old woman and she weighed little.

Ahead of him he heard Omun say: “Bez, look at this.”

He walked on. Omun was staring at something on the ground. Bez followed his gaze. It seemed like a child, but it could not be. He looked harder. Itwasa child, a boy, six or seven midsummers old, lying on his back, eyes open and staring lifelessly at the branches above.

His throat had been cut.

“No,” said Bez. “No, no.”

Omun picked up the child and they walked together into the clearing in front of the houses, and there they saw a scene so vile, so horrifying, so unbearably tragic that Bez could not take it in.

They were all dead.

All the children, all the old folk, the pregnant woman and the nursing mother and her baby. Some had been clubbed to death,some had had their throats cut. Some had run and been caught, and their bodies lay on the ground in poses of flight.

Bez put the body of Naro gently on the ground. As he did so, he saw something he had not noticed before: a bloodstained hole in her tunic, just over her heart.

The faces of his companions all wore the same look: mouths open in shock, eyes staring in disbelief.

He walked around, looking at each corpse. He wanted to weep, but he could not; he was too stunned.

At last he began to think sensibly. The bodies must be treated with respect. He tried to speak, but his throat constricted and he could not utter words. He breathed in and out slowly, and tried again. “We should lay them all down, side by side, here in the clearing,” he said. “With their legs straight and their arms folded. Come, let’s do right by the dead.”

They did as he said.

The mother and baby were left until last, perhaps because their deaths were hardest to contemplate. In the end it was Bez who bent over her. Mother and baby were both naked. He lifted the baby from her chest. It was a boy.

The baby cried.

Bez was so shocked he almost dropped it. “Alive!” he said.

He wondered whether the child had been overlooked. Or perhaps the murderers, despite the evil they were doing, had simply found themselves unable to cross that final line of depravity.

He stood up with the child in his arms. Its eyes were open and its legs kicked. Its skin was cold, but probably it had been kept alive by the warmth of its dead mother. Bez fell automatically intothe eternal position, holding the baby to his chest, one hand under its bottom, the other hand protecting the head. He felt its lips moving on the skin of his shoulder and realized it was seeking a nipple.

Omun said: “What are we going to do with him, Bez?”

“Take him to Round Wood. There will probably be a nursing mother in the tribe. They will take him, when we tell them the story of… this.”

The child cried again, and Omun said: “He’s hungry now.”

Bez looked at the baby, then at the dead mother, then back at the baby. Why not? he thought; it’s life or death.

He knelt down. With his left hand he lifted the dead mother’s shoulders until she was in a sitting position. Then he held the baby to her chest. It turned its head, lips making a sucking shape, until its mouth found what it was searching for; and at last its eyes closed in contentment and it began to feed.

The men and women of Bez’s tribe sat in the clearing in the remnant of West Wood. It was cold, but they had lit a big fire and huddled around it.

There were no children or old people: they were all dead. They had been killed here in this clearing, and farmers were the murderers. Pia had confirmed that to Gida. The Young Dogs had been silent at first, but they had not been able to keep their foul secret very long, and the truth had come out in whispered confessions to mothers and wives, until everyone in Farmplace knew it.

The faces around Bez were pale and tense with grief. They had all lost parents or children or both. So many bodies had been cremated here that there was still ash in the bushes and trees.