Jonathan Strahan - Swords & Dark Magic - The New Sword and Sorcery

I thought of my own childhood, and said nothing. “Where did he come from?”

“Down south.” Well, of course he did. “I said to him, you’re a long way from home. He didn’t deny it. Said it was his calling, whatever that’s supposed to mean.”

It was dark by the time we reached the farm. It was exactly what I’d been expecting: long and low, with turf eaves a foot off the ground, turf walls over a light timber frame. No trees this high up, so lumber had to come up the coast on a big shallow-draught freighter as far as Holy Trinity, then road haulage the rest of the way. I spent the first fifteen years of my life sleeping under turf, and I still get nightmares.

Mercifully, the Brother was there waiting for me. He was younger than I’d anticipated—you always think of village Brothers as craggy old fat men, or thin and brittle, like dried twigs with papery bark. Brother Stauracius couldn’t have been much over thirty; a tall, broad-shouldered man with an almost perfectly square head, hair cropped short like winter pasture, and pale blue eyes. Even without the habit, nobody could have taken him for a farmer.

“I’m so glad you could come,” he said, town voice, educated, rather high for such a big man. He sounded like he meant it. “Such a very long way. I hope the journey wasn’t too dreadful.”

I wondered what he’d done wrong, to have ended up here. “Thank you for your letter,” I said.

He nodded, genuinely pleased. “I was worried, I didn’t know what to put in and leave out. I’m afraid I’ve had no experience with this sort of thing, none at all. I’m sure there must be a great deal more you need to know.”

I shook my head. “It sounds like a textbook case,” I said.

“Really.” He nodded several times, quickly. “I looked it up in Statutes and Procedures , naturally, but the information was very sparse, very sparse indeed. Well, of course. Obviously, this sort of thing has to be left to the experts. Further detail would only encourage the ignorant to meddle.”

I thought about Grandfather: two shovels and an ax, job done. But not quite, or else I wouldn’t be here. “Fine,” I said. “Now, you’re sure there were no other deaths within six months of the first attack.”

“Quite sure,” he said, as though his life depended on it. “Nobody but poor Anthemius.”

Nobody had asked me to sit down, let alone take my wet boots off. The hell with it. I sat down on the end of a bench. “You didn’t say what he died of.”

“Exposure.” Brother Stauracius looked very sad. “He was caught out in a snowstorm and froze to death, poor man.”

“Near here?”

“Actually, no.” A slight frown, like a crack in a wall. “We found him about two miles from here, as it happens, on the big pasture between the mountains and the river. A long way from anywhere, so presumably he lost his way in the snow and wandered about aimlessly until the cold got to him.”

I thought about that. “On his way back home, then.”

“I suppose so, yes.”

I needed a map. You almost always need a map, and there never is one. If ever I’m emperor, I’ll have the entire country surveyed and mapped, and copies of each parish hung up in the temple vestries. “I don’t suppose it matters,” I lied. “You’ll take me to see the grave.”

A faint glow of alarm in those watered-down eyes. “In the morning.”

“Of course in the morning,” I said.

He relaxed just a little. “You’ll stay here tonight, naturally. I’m afraid the arrangements are a bit—”

“I was brought up on a farm,” I said.

Unlike him. “That’s all right, then,” he said. “Now I suppose we should join our hosts. The evening meal is served rather early in these parts.”

“Good,” I said.

Sleeping under turf is like being in your grave. Of course, there’s rafters. That’s what you see when you look up, lying wide-awake in the dark. Your eyes get the hang of it quite soon, diluting the black into gray into a palette of pale grays; you see rafters, not the underside of turf. And the smoke hardens it off, so it doesn’t crumble. You don’t get worms dropping on your face. But it’s un-avoidable, no matter how long you do it, no matter how used you are to it. You lie there, and the thought crosses your mind as you stare at the underside of grass; is this what it’ll be like?

The answer is, of course, no. First, the roof will be considerably lower; it’ll be the lid of a box, if you’re lucky enough to have one, or else no roof at all, just dirt chucked on your face. Second, you won’t be able to see it because you’ll be dead.

But you can’t help wondering. For a start, there’s temperature. Turf is a wonderful insulator: keeps out the cold in winter and the heat in summer. What it doesn’t keep out is the damp. It occurs to you as you lie on your back there: so long as they bury me in a thick shirt, won’t have to worry about being cold, or too hot in summer, but the damp could be a problem. Gets into your bones. A man could catch his death.

It’s while you’re lying there—everybody else is fast asleep; no imagination, no curiosity, or they’ve been working so hard all day they just sleep, no matter what—that you start hearing the noises. Actually, turf’s pretty quiet. Doesn’t creak like wood, gradually settling, and you don’t get drips from leaks. What you get is the thumping noises over your head. Clump, clump, clump, then a pause, then clump, clump, clump.

They tell you, when you’re a kid and you ask, that it’s the sound of dead men riding the roof-tree. They tell you that dead men get up out of the ground, climb up on the roof, sit astride the peak, and jiggle about, walloping their heels into the turf like a man kicking on a horse. You believe them; I never was quite sure whether they believed it themselves. When you’re older, of course, and you’ve left the farm and gone somewhere civilized, where it doesn’t happen, you finally figure it out: what you hear is sheep, hopping up onto the roof in the night, wandering about grazing the fine sweet grass that grows there, picking out the wild leeks, of which they’re particularly fond. Sheep, for crying out loud, not dead men at all. I guess they knew really, all along, and the stuff about dead men was to keep you indoors at night, keep you from wandering out under the stars (though why you should want to I couldn’t begin to imagine). Or at least, at some point, way back in the dim past, some smartass with a particularly warped imagination made up the story about dead men, to scare his kids; and the kids believed, and never figured it was sheep, and they told their kids, and so on down the generations. Maybe you never figure it out unless you leave the farm, which nobody ever does, except me.

As a matter of fact, I was just beginning to drift off into a doze when the thumping started. Clump, clump, clump; pause; clump, clump, clump. I was not amused. I was bone-tired and I really wanted to get some sleep, and here were these fucking sheep walking about over my head. The hell with that, I thought, and got up.

I opened the door as quietly as I could, not wanting to wake up the household, and I stood in the doorway for a little while, letting my eyes get used to the dark. Someone had left a stick leaning against the doorframe. I picked it up, on the off chance that there might be a sheep close enough to hit.

Something was moving about again. I walked away from the house until I could see up top.

It wasn’t sheep. It was a dead man.

He was sitting astride the roof, his legs drooping down either side, like a farmer on his way back from the market. His hands were on his hips and he was looking away to the east. He was just a dark shape against the sky, but there was something about the way he sat there: peaceful. I didn’t think he’d seen me, and I felt no great inclination to advertise my presence. If I say I wasn’t scared, I wouldn’t expect to be believed; but fear wasn’t uppermost in my mind. Mostly, I was interested .