Lament for the Afterlife

by Lisa L. Hannett

  He decides to go when the flame hushes. In the black, he’ll creep from the house, hood drawn low. He’ll steer clear of flambeaux. He’ll focus on the near-invisible path leading away from the road, into borderlands and bonefields. He’ll watch his steps. He won’t look up and wonder if anyone’s looking back down. He’ll keep his eyes forward.

  The wick sizzles and goes out. Peyt shakes the nerves from his legs as the room blends with the night. Wax hums, cooling on the headboard. Greasy smoke yawns into the air. Clutching his satchel, toes wriggling in his boots, Peytr breathes in the cabin’s stink and absorbs the quiet of leaving.

  “Bones or stones?”

  Swathed in grey winding sheets and cloaked in grey shawls, the woman squints at Peytr and repeats her question. Louder this time, so the gale won’t snatch it, tow it across the cemetery and down the headland’s churned slope, drop it in the red plains below with all the other lost words. Skirmish after skirmish followed Peyt to the coast, sticking close as memory from city to town to village to battlefield graveyard. The fight moved on without him when he decided to stop, to stay. Now the ground is swarming with skybunker girls. Glass-makers. Gravediggers. In the distance, negligéed banshees kneel among statues, singing dirges, hymns, laments. Greys lurk in the shadows, thin as the little girls’ keening, watching and waiting. And everywhere, everywhere Peytr looks, there is blood and skin and bones.

  Bones, he thinks, dropping his pack. Cutlery hasn’t been in there for years, but still he hears it clinking. Still he knows its weight. He looks away for a moment, squinting against the oncoming storm. To the east, a slate sea nudges the cliff’s base. A fleet of harbour-coffins sits low in the waves, heavy with drowned reinforcements. Peytr breathes in before giving his answer. The wind off the water tastes of tears.

  “Bones or stones?”

  What a voice, Peyt thinks, turning back to the woman. Her smooth white hand clutches a spade’s polished handle. A bare foot rests on the blade’s flat jaw. Poised for digging an extra hole in the ground; equally poised to trowel the sludge she hauled up the hill in an oversized bucket. What she does with that shovel is now up to him—No, Peyt corrects, gazing at the ’windless body laid out at their feet. It’s up to him.

  “Stones,” he says quietly, wishing Dake would sit up, knuckle-punch him, and say What you doing here, Dalmatian? Fuck off, now. Go on home.

  “You sure? You’d be a lot more useful in the ground, you know.”

  Peytr looks down. Daken’s arms are like strips of rawhide, his legs gnarled sticks strung with sinew. The muscles he was so proud of are wizened skin sacks, haze-worn and flaccid as an old man’s. His fingers and toes are swollen, purpled with chilblains. Long, dexterous toes that could snatch coins off the floor or pinch hard enough to make Peytr squeal. Long, rough fingers that would tweak Peyt’s ribs. Burr his ’wind. Twist his nose and ears and nipples. Long, warm fingers that often stretched out in the night, closing the distance between cots, squeezing, squeezing for comfort.

  The herd has run him so fuckin’ far, Peyt thinks, taking in the gashes on Dake’s soles, the splints round his shins. We’ve run so far to get here.

  Crouching, he gently strokes Daken’s bruised face. Only two years older than Peyt, he seems to have aged a hundred since they last saw each other. After all he must’ve done for those fuckin’ dogs, kept them close and safe, kept them fed and watered, they just up and left him mid-field, a grey arrow feathering his throat. Didn’t take much to snap the shaft, pull it clean out. Didn’t take much to lug the body—did it—to take it uphill to the graves. If Peyt hadn’t been here—

  If Peyt hadn’t been here—

  Not worth thinking about what ifs and might’ve beens.

  Before Peytr closed them, Dake’s eyes were filmed with scum; the deep creases around them made the boy, the man, near unrecognisable. If it wasn’t for these… . Peyt traces the crooked lines and scars marring the corpse’s cheeks, shaved scalp, temples. Some are short and white, traces of frantic nail-scrapings. Others are ridged, crescent-shaped: faded, decades-old bites. These Peyt will never forget.

  “Let him rest while he can,” he says to the digger. “It’s my watch.”

  “As you wish,” she replies. Her robes flap in the wind as she bends to collect Peyt’s ruck and packs; the long hem lifts to knee-height, revealing gaunt calves marbled with pale blue veins. After placing the bags on a carved plywood plinth at the fresh grave’s head, she takes Peytr’s hand with a surprisingly firm grip, holding him steady as he climbs. Settling into the freshly-turned dirt, the box wobbles as Peyt tries to find the right stance atop it. Flexing his legs left, right, left he balances with feet widespread, gear slumped in between. Lowering his hood, he relaxes into the pose: arms crossed, head bowed, ’wind honest.

  I’m with you… . I’m with you… . I’m with you …

  “The burden of this one’s life is not yours to carry,” the woman says, slipping into a singsong tone, uttering stilted phrases as if by rote. “Will you accept its weight?” As she speaks, a girl wearing long rubber gloves and a butcher’s apron over a patched denim dress crests the hill. She carries two hard plastic pails, one half-filled with oil, the other with damp flannel rags. Lifting both as if to say, Ready? she scuffs to a stop beside Daken’s head and waits for the digger to finish her spiel.

  “Will you bear the granite of this one’s sorrows and forbear the feathered wing of his joys?”

  Peytr doesn’t hesitate. “I will.”

  “Will you mark all the moments of this one’s life? You and no other, now and forever?”

  He doesn’t think of it as dying.

  “I will.”

  “Will you stand vigil, steadfast and true, long after this one is reborn?”

  It’s an ending, he thinks. But also a beginning.

  “I will.”

  “Will you take the past into your present so this one can move into the future?”

  It’s an overdue apology.

  “I will,” he says.

  These past months, these weeks, and now these cemetery moments—they’re all part of the same sequence, Peytr realises. A procession of final touches.

  The way the glass-maker swabs Daken’s scarred face, his broad chest, his limp cock. Skybunker girls have already harvested his wordwind; now the residue of Dake’s hopes, his happy memories and dreams is sopped into flannel and wrung into the oil bucket. This girl doesn’t have Amelia’s skill, Peyt thinks, shifting to get a better look. She muddies the highs by blending them together. She drips the new in with the old. The quality of Amelia’s product always reflected those of its maker: plain. More pure than sullied, more sharp than soft. Far too addictive, far too easily consumed. “Leave enough for the spirit to quicken,” the digger says, but the girl doesn’t have much to work with, it seems. Soon enough, she’s finished.

  The way Zaya had been, when Peyt went home one last time, looking for Euri, finding the little one instead. Not so little anymore, now she’s done growing. Still too small, too vulnerable to live alone in that house. What’s happened? he remembers asking. Her dark skin had been flawless, nothing like his, her fuzzy curls cropped close to the skull. She’d looked at him blankly, arms hanging by her slim hips, offering no welcome, no embrace.

  Where is everyone? Where’s your ’wind?

  Ashes, he thought Zaya had said, but couldn’t be sure without reading it. Behind her the front hall was empty, the living room party to ghosts. The furniture was mostly still there—the grandfather clock was missing, the curio cabinet displaying nothing but dust—but the air was cold with absence. Zaya had lifted a hand above her head, flourishing the empty space where her ’wind would be. Look, Peytie. Just look up.

  There are no words, he’d said quietly, eyes steady, locked on hers. There’s nothing to see.

  It’s safer, he’d thought, dropping his gaze. It’s safer without ’winds.

  Are you stoned? Stepping in close, she’d whipped his hood off and began to read aloud. It�
��s safer without …

  “Zaya, no—” Peytr says, and the digger frowns up at him.

  “My name is Swan,” she says, voice trembling, but beautiful. Singing under her breath, she turns back to her task, shovelling slop from the large bucket onto Daken’s sternum.

  Man, Peytr thinks as she reaches the chorus. What a warble.

  The way Swan spreads muck around, uneven, concentrating on the middle and ends, avoiding the face: final touches. Covering Daken’s extremities, his belly, the crown of his head. Peyt doesn’t know where she got the off-white mud; the cemetery is faded grass and crushed shell, ’wind-powder and deep brown earth. Smeared on the body, the digger’s paste leaches what the glass-maker left behind. Lethargy. Sadness. Regret. The bleak hue of Daken’s skin.

  Leaving the sludge to dry, she turns her attention to Peyt. Squatting, she brushes grime off the plinth, gouging mould from intricate images engraved in the wood. “Gourds for you,” she says, interrupting her song. Leaning back on her heels to admire the patterns. “Full, not hollow. Deliverance from grief. And for this one,” she tilts her chin at Daken, “a rooster. Awakening, courage, vigilance. Stone will always guard these promises—and we will help to keep them.”

  “Thank you.”

  Swan inclines her head, neither accepting nor rejecting Peyt’s gratitude. Kneeling, she raises a cairn of pebbles around the plinth, slowly covering the fine decorations, the low platform and satchels, and finally Peytr’s feet. Pressure builds up his arches, ankles, shins; firm and painful. Single rocks are light as onions; by the hundreds they crush fine bones in his toes, jab his tendons, pierce his trousers and bite his shins. It’s almost impossible, now, to run. I could stop her, he thinks. Any time.

  He waits for panic to set in with the stones.

  He waits while Swan takes a blunt wooden blade from the folds of her robe and scrapes the dried mud off Daken’s body, moving from the feet up. It’s a tedious, methodical task. Peytr sways as she works inch by inch, tapping every last scraping back into the vessel. Chanting, she combines dry flecks in with what’s left of the wet. While she stirs, the mixture darkens from cream to tar, blackened by time and hurt.

  “Speak no more with words or ’wind,” Swan says, dragging the pot close to the cairn. “True commemoration is a matter of expression, gesture, posture. From now on, remember this one with your body alone.”

  For weeks Peyt has contemplated this moment, this pose. It has to be right, it has to mean something. To Daken. To him. As Swan scoops the first handful of clay and grinds it against his calf, he shakes the nerves from his limbs. Releases a long, shuddering breath. Brings his hands up to his mouth. With elbows tucked close to his sides, Peytr lifts his chin and looks straight ahead. Gaze fixed on a point beyond the horizon. Fingers pressed flat, covering his lips.

  Singing ice into Peytr’s veins, Swan packs him in clay, weaving instructions through her verses. Tilt back… . Steady now… . Lean forward… . Breathe normally… . Don’t breathe… . Without moving his head, Peyt steals glimpses at her while she smooths and scores and stipples. Her hair pale and wispy with gravedust. Her shroud flimsy but somehow obscuring. Her hands deft with trowel and brush and palette knife. Cold seeps up his legs, stiffening. Peytr stirs, loosing a shower of pebbles. Cold grips his guts. There is intimacy in being captured by an artist, he thinks. In being measured, observed, assessed. In being told what to do, how to move or not move. Cold restrains his elbows, arms, shoulders. Swan’s watery eyes tangibly sketch his outlines; he feels their scrutiny like a pencil tracing his dips and ridges. In her hands, Peytr is helpless. Raw. Revealed by the millimetre.

  Swan kneads and cuts and shapes until Peytr is slathered hard. Her touch is confident, practised, assertive. And that voice! What a serenade she’d sing. What a lullaby.

  A dream for someone else, he thinks, knowing it’s too late for the company of warm bodies. Too late for anything but final touches.

  The way Swan saves his face, the tips of his fingers for last. “Shall I get rid of this?” she asks, flicking his beard with her trowel. “Those skin-blossoms of yours will make stunning patterns in the stonework.”

  “Yes,” he says. “All right.”

  Clambering down the cairn to get a blade, Swan breaks the rhythm of incantation and says, “Don’t move a muscle.”

  Peyt’s breath flutters in and out as she shaves years from his face, turns him back into a boy. When she’s done, the wind off the sea stinging raw flesh, Swan trades the razor for her scraper and a tarnished silver spoon. Crouching, she swiftly gouges out Daken’s eyes. Pulping them between her palms, she flicks gobs of gel onto the ground then carries the flattened shells up to Peytr. Standing on tiptoe, she peels his fingers away from his mouth. “Open wide,” she says, popping the whites onto his tongue while he stammers, too encased now to cry out.

  “Be brave,” she says. “It’s better you than them.”

  Swan’s lullaby is sweet. Reassuring. Relaxing. It coaxes the husks down Peyt’s throat, soothes him as the mud rises above his nose and cheekbones, reaching his eyes. As he swallows, he expects to have visions, to see what Daken has seen all these years, a lifetime otherwise lost in the dark. He sighs until Swan clogs his nostrils. There’s nothing new here. Nothing he hasn’t seen before.

  Greys fog his sight but Peytr isn’t afraid. Daken is lying beside him and the girls are nearby—he can hear them still, whispering. Secret fingers strum his ’wind, slowly stealing his thoughts: the filthy, the lonely, the clean. Take them, take them. There will be stories to replenish him soon. There are always stories before sleep.

  Blinking takes an age. When his lids gum open, the greys are stealing closer. The girls have drifted off but Dake is here, Dake is with him. Peyt can’t—doesn’t need to—look down. He knows Daken will always be near.

  On the horizon, a flare ignites. A strange gleam of a cold sun, dazzling bright. Peytr wants to point, to gape with all the field ants, flap with the vultures, but his arms are granite. His stone hands are fused to his mouth. He closes his eyes to shut the light out. Dark blue and green afterimages bloom before him, mushroom-clouding the crimson sky of his lids. This eruption looked much bigger than the one Jean became, much less contained. Was it some grey trick? Some sort of retaliation?

  Maybe, Peyt thinks.

  Maybe not.

  Imagining what will happen in the next few minutes, Peytr is petrified, but not scared. He stands quietly, and listens. It isn’t over, he thinks. It isn’t over. But his mouth is firmly closed. His legs do not tremble. He is safe, solid stone. And he is still.

  Acknowledgements

  An earlier version of Chapter 10 first appeared as “The Good Window” in Fantasy Magazine (September 2009).

  An earlier version of Chapter 13 first appeared as “Their Own Executioners” in ChiZine (July – September 2010).

  An earlier version of Chapter 14 first appeared as “Singing Breath into the Dead” in Music for Another World, edited by Mark Harding (Mutation Press, 2010).

  “The Ministers of Human Fate” owes much to the political stylings and righteous passion of Abraham Lincoln’s “Temperance Address,” given in Springfield, Illinois on February 22, 1842.

  Author’s thanks

  Huge thanks to Brett Savory and Sandra Kasturi for giving this novel a perfect home—and for wrapping it in a gorgeous Erik Mohr cover. Still pinching myself! Many, many, many thanks to Samantha Beiko for editing the manuscript with such an astute and delicate touch (and for the tears!)—it has been such a blast working with you all.

  Also ranking at the top of the gratitude department: Angela Slatter, for mainlining the full manuscript in one weekend and, as always, offering unfailing support (Skype dates, surprise parcels, coffee, chocolate) while I was writing; Kirstyn McDermott, for reading early drafts and offering generous feedback; and Chad Habel, for not only supporting but feeding my addiction to war stories and films, for letting me pick his brain about politics, for beta-reading this book and tota
lly getting it (and me).